Smokey!

By Carrie Jacobson

The spring birds are coming back, and it looks like our hawks are with them.

Last summer, a pair of red-shouldered hawks nested along our driveway. We were afraid, at first, for the other birds, but they seemed to do them no harm. We live beside a nature conservancy, and there’s plenty of food for raptors.

It was really fun to watch the baby hawks learn to fly – and we laughed at their efforts to learn how to hunt. Smokey, the dog in this painting, sat in a window for hours watching with us.

At first, I thought one of the babies was developmentally disabled, as I watched it trying to stomp on worms.

“Look,” I said to my husband, and pointed at the bird and its very strange behavior. “I’m afraid he’s not going to make it.”

But after a couple days of stomping around the yard, he caught a worm. Then he spent a couple days – whole days – sitting motionless on a branch outside Peter’s office. And on the afternoon of the second day, he swooped down and caught a mouse or a chipmunk or something, and he was off and running.

So it’s good to have the hawks back, along with the bluebirds, the robins and the mourning doves.

Spring!