Soaring Red-shouldered Hawks
Late in the morning yesterday, on a cold but sunny Valentine’s Day, two Red-shouldered Hawks were soaring and calling kee-yer to each other in a big, soft blue sky with rumpled white clouds. The sun shined through their wings – held in a shape more bow-like than the wide spread of a red-tailed hawk – and the colors and patterns in their wings looked almost like stained glass, showing reddish-brown on the shoulders and breast, and a complex dark and white toward the edges, clear “windows” in each wing, and the tails fanned out in dark and white bands. When they turned, the rust-red shoulders showed up uncommonly well. They were a fine sight – and a fine sound. It’s about time for them to begin courtship and starting a nest, so it’s very good to know they are around – because I’d seen so little of them over the winter, I had begun to wonder. There was also a third Red-shouldered Hawk, this one a juvenile, darker and more brown all over, maybe the same one I saw a couple of days ago, flying over the road and crying its own kee-yer.
Seeing and hearing the Red-shouldered Hawks soaring in the big blue sky, especially after this long cold, gray winter, often dreary and raining for days, lifted my own spirits and made me feel lighter and more optimistic all over.