The Hawks

Mike and I have the habit of sitting down to read for an hour or so in the afternoons. Mike has been finding a sheltered but sunny spot on the patio. I've been curling up on the love seat that sits in a sunny window. Because he is outside, Mike has been able to watch a large hawk flying into one of the lob lolly pines in the neighborhood. Later, he realized it was two large hawks always carrying some food in their mouths. Out came the binoculars, but he couldn't see a nest.

Here's the thing about Mike. He only has vision in one eye, but the vision he does have is that of a hawk. He is always picking out wild life along the roadside--turkey, deer, a woodchuck way off in the corner of a field, an eagle soaring way up in the sky. I miss all that stuff because my vision is not that acute or well trained and, besides, someone has to WATCH THE ROAD.

That said, I was driving us home from the beach on Tuesday and I was just pulling to a stop at the corner of our street when I looked up at the nearby tree and said, "There are the two hawks!"

"Where? Where? I can't see anything. Are you sure?" Well, that made me slightly unsure--could be a bird shaped knot in the tree branch, I suppose, but as soon as we got home, I got the binoculars and went back to the corner to look. It took me a while to get a good focus and just the right angle, but no doubt there were two hawks sitting in the tree. It turns out they were immature, the babies, not the adults that Mike had been watching. But I spotted them (first)!