Redtail

I went out the door one frosty, autumn morning to be greeted by a sight of such beauty and hilarity that I still laugh to myself every time I think of it.

It was my final year of seminary - we lived about thirty miles outside Boston in the area of Massachusetts they call the North Shore, not more than a ten minute drive from the Atlantic. The seminary campus sat on Brown's Hill, the highest point in Essex County, and on its 80+ acres could be found any number of interesting species of wildlife: orioles, goldfinches, porcupines, squirrels, ladybird beetles aplenty, and this particular year, a pair of redtail hawks.

I didn't see them very often, I presume because they nested high in the trees. But every now and then, usually when I wasn't looking, my eye would catch a flash of red tail feathers in the morning sun or glimpse one of the majestic birds standing proudly on the ground or perched on a branch. One time I had been driving up the hill when I saw them both circling barely above the treetops, not hunting, but gliding effortlessly in repeating spirals, just for fun.

This morning I was walking across the parking lot of our apartment building, shivering on my way to class. Suddenly, one of the great winged predators swept low out from the trees to my left over the parking lot. He couldn't have been more than a hundred feet in front of me and came within twenty feet of the ground. He was magnificent, covered in silky brown, milky white, and rusty red tones glimmering in the early morning sunshine. He was moving fast, very fast, like a pilot barnstorming the rows of parked vehicles still covered with crystalline dew-drops. I don't think he flapped his wings even once as he crossed over the lot and deftly wafted up to a perch atop one of the dormers of the apartment building across the way. There he stood for a moment, regal and stately, like a king surveying his land from the castle tower...

...and dropped a deuce off the side of the building that fell forty feet to the earth below.