Tough Love – Hawk Style

Where we live must be good for hawks. I think because we are near an undeveloped open area and some mixed woods so there are likely a variety of prey to feast on. I say we are in a good area because we seem to have offspring every year.

And we know this because at some point, the parents stop feeding the young and the young don’t take it well. We’ve named this one screechy because that’s what we hear outside the house this time of year. I know nature is about survival and we figure they eventually figure it out but it is always kind of sad to hear the young ones screeching away.

I mean I suppose there is no way to tell them that they are on their own. Just one day, the parents stop responding. Maybe they taper off slowly but at some point the young ones need to figure out how to feed themselves. We tend to assign our own feelings to things like this. I doubt the adults really feel anything like guilt when hearing the young ones screech like this. So I guess we feel it for them.

Today, the young one was circling overhead screeching away. I saw a second hawk which I took to be an adult flying circles in the other direction and not making a sound. Kind of like they wanted to ditch the kid and get away from the noise.

So it will be a little noisy from time to time around here for a couple of weeks. Just nature doing its thing.

PS – didn’t want to mention the virus but I’m finding that since the CDC continually updates their site it doesn’t make sense to do an update for a week until near the end of the next week. By then, things have stabilized a bit. Also, the numbers look really bad and I don’t feel like writing about it right now. So you get this little short take instead.