The last day of February was cloudy and warm all day, uncomfortably warm and humid by late in the afternoon, with a strong southwest wind blowing low grim clouds steadily across the sky.<\/p>\n
Two Black Vultures soared high, and a Turkey Vulture lower, and as I was watching them fly in the wind, two small hawks came into view \u2013 Sharp-shinned Hawks. At first they both were fairly low, and they took several minutes to circle and climb until they were quite high.<\/p>\n
They were perfect Sharp-shinned Hawks, neat and compact in shape, with long narrow tail, distinctly square at the tip; the head relatively small, the wings broad and short and slightly arcing forward. The flight of both hawks was classic \u2013 several light, quick flaps followed by a glide, then flapping and gliding again. Sharp-shinned Hawks are a joy to watch. Their flight is clean and crisp and sleek \u2013 giving an impression of intensity and focus. As they rose higher, they soared more and flapped less, and when gliding, the wings and tail were held so still, so perfect \u2013 they almost looked like toy gliders.<\/p>\n
Much later in the day, as the last light of February faded away, spring peepers sang from down around the creek in a cloudy, windy, warm twilight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The last day of February was cloudy and warm all day, uncomfortably warm and humid by late in the afternoon, with a strong southwest wind blowing low grim clouds steadily across the sky. Two Black Vultures soared high, and a Turkey Vulture lower, and as I was watching them fly in the wind, two small […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1144"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1147,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1144\/revisions\/1147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}