Just about anywhere, if I am quiet, something happens. A little bit, or in this case, a big bit of nature turns up. Please pardon me, I know I have droned on about the backyard this year but for 2020, it is my cruising grounds. In the past the grounds have been the billion year old rocks of the North Channel on Lake Huron, and the Trent Severn and Rideau canals of Canada; Lake Champlain and the Hudson River; NYC and the coast of New Jersey; and the Chesapeake’s estuaries. It has been Downeast Maine’s rocky coast and the adventures associated with negotiating the Bay of Fundy’s tides and currents.
Every one of these is worthy of comment, and when I can pry myself away from the present dilemma, their images occupy the free space left in my mind. On occasion, that something that happens drags the natural world, even in the middle of a metropolis like Chicago, into view.
In July, the backyard’s west facing patio began to heat up despite deploying a large sun blocking umbrella. During the day, an elm shades the east facing front room making it a cooler place to put one’s feet up. But as five o’clock nears, the back of the house becomes approachable.
I move the garbage picked white plastic chair onto the grass. A thirty foot blue spruce (planted a few weeks after moving in) provides shade. At first, I sit straight to read but after a few paragraphs slump and begin to nod off. I give in to the languor of the warm summer afternoon.
It is nice if there is a breeze. The wind chimes make cooling sounds, and the meter high plants and vegetables rustle creating white noise that almost negates the air conditioner’s buzz. The backyard fills with bird songs.
Sparrows are noisy little creatures that are given to hysteria; I typically ignore their outbursts. I might raise an eyelid if they are particularly boisterous and that is what happened this particular afternoon: screeching and then a whoosh directly off my bow. In the wake of the brown blur that had passed, came a batch of house sparrows in hot pursuit.
I turned to my left and there, two power poles away was a magnificent hawk being ravaged, verbally at least by the gang of sparrows. I lunged up the back porch’s stairs to retrieve my trusty Nikon SLR with the 18-200mm lens that I keep close for such occasions. I thought please stay put, don’t fly away until I can capture the moment. It did but not before moving a bit more to the left to put distance between itself and the noisy hoard.
In years of taking photographs, especially since the advent of cheap memory, I have learned to snap multiple pictures and not worry about the particulars of framing, exposure, back lighting, composition, all the things that are taught in photography 101 courses. Time is unforgiving, never to be repeated. Get the image while it is there and worry about the details later.
And later I identified the hawk to be an immature Cooper’s hawk. Its immaturity (this is I anthropomorphizing) is the reason it let itself be bullied by the sparrows. Nonetheless, it was an impressive raptor standing well over a foot with perfectly quaffed brown and white plumage. It must have been stunned by the sparrow’s reaction, as it sat looking perplexed for quite sometime.
Eventually, at the sparrows urging it took off south and once more, they took up the chase. To watch this badass bird being put in its place by such a diminutive force was thought provoking. I am sure there was a moral in this, but the languor quickly set in and I resumed nodding.
