Yesterday's Entry

[eredien]

This entry was supposed to have been put in here yesterday, but LJ has been acting up all this weekend, and I had to reinstall my digital camera software. So, here 'tis.

I finally got pictures of the campus hawk. I was walking back from lunch and saw it sitting there, perched on a light post outside Thomas Great Hall. Wild America it wasn't, but it was better than nothing.

I ran and grabbed my camera and took this picture, which I hope to enter in the campus photography contest.



It is a Red-Tailed Hawk. I should (courtesy of my 12th grade Ecology Class and Mr. Pens) be able to tell if it is female or male, but I can't. I took a few other pictures, but one is blurry and it's hard to see the hawk in the other one.

Then, I sat on a bench and did Russian while watching the hawk out of the corner of my eye. When next I looked up, it had gone. I stood up to go to class, and turned around to grab my backpack. I looked up and stepped back a pace, stood there in shock.

The hawk had been perched on the lightpole between my bench and the next, not ten feet over my head the whole time.

I tried to take another picture, but of course the hawk took off, and my camera wasn't read when it spread its wings, feathers catching the afternoon light in gold and brown, and floated off between the red and yellow maple and dark green pines in the little grove. But I'll hold that picture in my mind forever.
Fall is so beautiful.

Comments

[arcturax.livejournal.com]

Neat :) We get a lot of those around here too :) Especially out where I work, lots of hills and country out that way and plenty of hawks. We also get really cool vultures :) There have been more and more hawks here in the last decade according to a story I read. THey are just now recovering from the DDT problems of the 50's o.o That and Ohio used to be one of the most polluted states in the nation, espeically along the river and up by the great lakes. There is a river up near Cleveland that used to catch fire in the summer and burn for weeks from all the crap in it. They've done a much better job cleaning things up now, mainly due to the fact our last governor was really good at managing things. So wildlife is actually up here to record levels since the early 70's :)