Two encounters with hawks

Sunday as I was riding my bicycle down Highway 1 to San Luis Obispo, a hawk or a turkey vulture drifting on an air current just off to my right cast a shadow that wobbled at an angle across the shoulder right into my path. I rode right through it, and for a fraction of a second—about the time it would take light, traveling about 67 million times faster than I was pedaling, to circle the earth twice, if light traveled in a circle—that bird was the only thing between me and the sun.

Then this morning, or it might have been yesterday, I was sitting here at my sister’s desk, which affords a lovely view through a picture window of Morro Bay and the sand spit that frames it and the ocean beyond, when a hawk came swooping in under the eaves of the garage on my left about five feet off the ground, made a hard left turn around the birdbath about ten feet from the house and flew off. It came in so low and went by so fast, I couldn’t tell but thought maybe it snatched up a mouse just before it made that turn. If it did, it was the smoothest, quickest act of predation I’ve ever either witnessed or wondered whether I had. If you blinked, you missed it entirely, if in fact it happened at all. I thought I saw a rodent’s tail and various other extremities dangling from the hawk’s beak as it flew off, but I couldn’t tell for sure. I might have imagined the mouse, but the hawk was real, a blur of fluttering red and brown feathers, pumping muscles and grace. It made that hard turn look easy, and as it came out of it, it flapped its wings and for a second, through the double-paned window, you could hear them drubbing the air. Then it flew up and off, back toward the left, toward Los Osos, with a smaller bird in characteristic pursuit. Maybe it found a perch somewhere and enjoyed a leisurely snack, or congregated with its friends and gave them a good laugh describing the gawking human in the house it buzzed.