A close encounter of the hawk kind…

The snow did come last night, but not a lot, and the interesting wrinkle, which I only discovered once I was in the park, is that there must have been some freezing rain for a bit, before it changed over to snow, because the trails were as slippery as I’ve ever experienced them. I even ended up on my butt at one point, but I managed to keep the shiny side up, so no harm was done, at least to my gear. The upside, however, is that I almost had the park to myself for a change, which is always nice.

The second treat of the morning was finding one of the muskrats up on the river ice at the north end.

The third treat was meeting two fellow nature appreciators by the pond, whom I knew from our Monday Wildlife Walks. I hope they can join us again next week.

It was shortly after that, as I made my way back to the river, that the main event started. I had seen one, and then two, red-tailed hawks earlier and high over the southern playground as I hiked to the pond, but they flew off to the east before I could get close enough for a picture. We haven’t had a good look at one since the start of January.

Well, one of them must have come back, because as I strolled down the paved path beside the dog park before heading into the woods, look who I noticed perched on the railing there barely ten feet away from me. I immediately froze, of course, eased my camera up, and couldn’t believe my luck that it let me sneak this portrait.

This is one of those times when WordPress fails us with its meager image resolution, and I hope you do yourself the favor of clicking on the image, or this link, so you can zoom in on Flickr to see all the detail. Upon closer inspection, I wonder if it isn’t the same young bird that we did see at the start of January.

Anyway, the hawk soon took off, as one would expect, but it barely flew a dozen feet before perching again on the railing just across the path. I suspect it wasn’t even fleeing me, but merely following its prey, and it even let me have another portrait.

Then it flew only another dozen feet into the woods and landed on this low pile of sticks.

There it appeared to be looking for some way to reach the rodent it was after. The hawk was there so long that I even remembered to try capturing some video.

After a couple of videos, I switched back to still, and it seemed like I had all day, even though it clearly saw me kneeling in the snow not thirty feet away.

This next video is fun because you can see it moving its head around to get a better look at something overhead. I see plenty of videos online of owls doing this, but I don’t believe that I’ve had the opportunity before to see a hawk do this.

Finally, it must have figured that the rodent was not coming out from under there, so it lightened its load, and then took off almost straight towards me. What an absolutely magical encounter.

Lastly, after I hiked back up the bluff and out of the woods at the south end, I found this red squirrel, whose cousin up north might just have been the rodent that the hawk had been looking for. Small world, eh?