At Wood Lake Nature Center yesterday, I heard the fervent QUIRRR! of a red-bellied woodpecker in the trees above me, but I did not see it anywhere. In that same area I paused to look at a potential raptor nest in the fork of a tree, and sure enough, there was a hawk sitting in it, looking around intently, its yellow eyes looking defensive and alert. It was probably a Cooper’s hawk. I surmised it was incubating some eggs. All of a sudden, on the tree trunk below it, the red-bellied woodpecker had appeared and was making its way up toward the nest, climbing and stopping to peck on the tree. It pecked at the bottom of the nest, with the hawk sitting in it and looking alarmed at the commotion below it. There were no doubt bugs in there, it being a place with hawk feces and perhaps rotting bits of meat. The woodpecker may have found a bug or two, and then it moved on up the branch. Sure enough, it there met face-to-face with the hawk from only ten or twelve inches away. It gave an alarm call and flew off noisily. The hawk remained there, having been perturbed only by a small, oblivious bird and not by some ovivorous predator.
I observed this interaction over the span of two or three minutes, and then lowered my binoculars from my eyes. That was when I noticed a man sitting at the base of the tree that held the hawk and nest. He was looking directly at me. I don’t know if he was a drunk, or a nature lover observing some nest or creature, or what. I don’t know whether he knew there was a hawk and nest above him. But he was definitely looking at me when I finally noticed him. I quickly walked off. It was only later in my hike that the irony of the situation occurred to me: here were two sequences of events that mirrored each other and took place concurrently. One involved an oblivious bird startled by a hawk, and the other involved oblivious me being startled by some guy sitting in the underbrush. Couldn’t he have made his presence known earlier so as not to startle me? The woodpecker might have thought the same thing about the hawk, if its brain were bigger than an almond.
pseudoisaac 