Crows and Hawk

The other day I was in the backyard when I heard the frenzied caws of a murder of crows coming from the street.   I sprinted through the house, grabbed my camera, and stood out on the front porch.  Sure enough, there were eight or so crows, with more winging in from various directions, gathered in the branches of the neighbor's maple tree across the street.   When I looked more closely, I found what I was pretty sure would be there:  a red-tailed hawk.  

Crows will mob a hawk or other raptor, buzzing it while cawing at the top of their lungs.  The hawk typically looks resigned and eventually flies away.  If they wanted to do something about the crows, they could, but I guess it's not worth the trouble.  Crows are interesting, and I'll confess to indulging in the fantasy of making friends with them and having them bring me shiny junk; but it was difficult not to see them as bullying middle-schoolers in that moment. 

I took photos with wild abandon.  There was a frantic moment where I was re-adjusting the ISO to so I could get a quicker shutter speed and then another moment when I was looking for things to lean against to compensate for using high-powered zoom without a tripod.   I got one well-composed shot of both the hawk and a crow.  I tried to repeat the shot by managing to look at the hawk with one eye for a wide-angle view of what was going one and at the scene super-zoomed up on my camera's screen--somehow I did not get sick, but my lucky shot didn't repeat.  

Eventually, I had to go back into the house because Aoife had been left behind in the backyard when I ran off, and, according to Mark, she was going to crash her way through the patio door in a theatrically desperate (and yammeringly operatic) attempt to discover my location and status among the quick or the dead.