At least he didn’t know the Cooper’s hawk was coming (not for long, anyway). I witness predation events pretty frequently around here. My only wish, since the hawks need to eat as well, is that Artemis would show up a bit more quickly to dispatch prey with her painless arrows, but that’s not how the natural world really works.

The yard has been purposefully turned into a bird garden. There’s a lot of evergreen cover for passerines to hide in when flushed, so the raptors aren’t always successful. For levity’s sake, I’ll share that I felt one of these birds bomb so close to my head while I was planting a native buckwheat at dusk last week that I felt its beating wings over my head. It spared me its talons, no doubt realizing that my bouncing ponytail as I wielded my hori-hori wasn’t one of the California ground squirrels living below the fence after all.