Hawk Blogging

Over the past few days, we’ve seen this small hawk flitting about in and near our front yard, executing spectacular aerobatics as it darts through our shrubbery, always very near the ground. For some reason it decided to perch in a fig tree that’s just 15 feet from our windows, and I managed to grab these photos by standing in the shadows inside the house, and taking the pictures right through our (very dirty!) window panes.

I love it’s expression in the left-most picture, when it spotted my motion and was trying to figure out if I was edible! Moments after I snapped this one, it took off for parts unknown…

Hawks are notoriously hard to identify, and this one was no exception. From its size and behavior, it was easy to identify it as an accipiter — small, agile hawks that prey on other birds. But two nearly identical accipiters are common here (the Sharp-Shinned Hawk and Cooper’s Hawk), making positive identification challenging. I’m calling this one a juvenile Sharp-Shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus), based on the paintings in Sibley’s Guide to Birds (an absolutely wonderful book!).

As always, click on the small photos to get a larger version.

Quote of the Day

James Lileks:

It comes down to this: Islam is being defined in the popular mind by three forces: the radicals who kill, the PR-savvy activists who protest, and the officials who cave. The aggregate effect does not produce good will.

Yes, that’s exactly right. The barbaric and outrageous actions (whatever their motivation) of the fundamentalist Islamic radicals are seen by most Americans (and portrayed by the lamestream media) as something much more benign than they actually are. And somehow the spectacular (by any historical standard) successes of our military are almost unknown to the populace. This dangerously warped perception is, I’m afraid, on the verge of controlling how we prosecute the war on terror. Even more frightening: it seems plausible that the only thing that will change this is another successful attack by the enemy. In this age of short attention spans, a deadly enemy seems to be perceived as such only if they kill, say, a few thousand Americans each year. And in this age of shallow, sound-bite “thinking,” the analysis of a disturbingly large segment of America seems to be limited to the latest pronouncement from their favorite promise-spouting, feel-good pol.

Read the whole thing.