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Hawks and Doves and Dreams
The drama continues
In some of my recent stories I have been talking about how a family of three hawks have rather forcefully entered my life as of late. I hear them screeching all day long from about 8:30 in the morning to just before the sun sets. And their favorite perch seems to be the telephone pole directly outside my office window where they will sit and screech for hours. It has actually made it a little difficult to focus on writing.
(Perhaps they want me to write about them.)
Of course I am only guessing that they are a family. Two of the hawks are larger than the third one. The smaller hawk is almost as big as the two larger hawks, with less coloration, and I think it may be the offspring of the two larger hawks. I’m thinking it’s like a teenager — although I doubt that is the correct ornithological terminology.
Yesterday I saw one of the bigger hawks bring a morsel of food in its talons which it deposited on the very top of the telephone pole. The smaller hawk, which was sitting on the power line just a couple of feet from the pole, hopped up to the top of the pole and began eating. How long, I wondered, do hawk parents continue to feed their young? Shouldn’t the parents be teaching the teenager hawk how to hunt? How long will the teenager hawk continue to mooch off its parents?
