If you’ve been reading for a while, you may remember the Dorkasaur post, in which I caught a hawk kicking through scrub as if it had lost its keys. In that post, I noted that, as long as the raptor is above us — flying or perched — there is no doubt it is an apex predator.

Case in point — this is the same hawk, well before the moment it landed in the brush. It saw something, and hawks obviously can’t think the way people can, but it knew something was there and it was calculating how hard it would be to catch it and how worthwhile that effort would end up being.

That it studied very specific spots in this way was what made the Dorkasaur photo stand out to me. Clearly it heard and saw a lot going on around it, and yet it just jumped to the ground and started kicking around.

For my last few years of work, I’d turned my cubicles into galleries of my photography. I’m happy to say that this was always prominently placed and got a fair amount of attention from passersby.

April 9, 2022. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D850 (FX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm at 400mm, f/9.5, 1/250, ISO 64.