1) If you’re feeling the heat this summer, I can recommend something that will give you a quick chill: watching a hawk fly into your range of vision at roughly 30 feet. That’s what happened this morning when I was walking through what I call the “back forty” at the cemetery. I was just about to turn onto a new path and then whoosh, a very large wingspan appeared through a shaft of sunlight and settled atop a bush. Wow! I wasn’t going to get any closer and have it claw out my eyes like in The Exorcist or that movie with that Damien kid or whatever the movie was - and don’t tell me, either! - but this definitely felt like a special message I need to decode. Later it lit atop a monument, and then it flew away low through a shady section of graves.
1a) Birders love cemeteries for experiences like this. No, I don’t see myself becoming a birder, but I’ll be on the lookout for more of these big ol’ hawks.
2) Seeing that hawk lent a sinister note to the calls of shrikes in the trees as I continued my walk.
3) And then, walking down a path I rarely take, another scary bird of prey entered my range of vision. Only this one was a sculpture marking the grave of a soldier who was killed in 1923.
Intimidating, isn’t it?!