I love this photo because, like falcons, hawks are kickass birds that are here to talk about their dinosaur heritage while they eat your dog. When you see them essentially anywhere above you — flying or perched on a branch, scouting for food or eating it — they manage to look pretty majestic. You know that’s an apex predator. But one Sunday afternoon, I spotted this hawk on the arms of a cross above a convent across the street from the nature preserve. I started snapping and it slowly flew in closer, jumping from branch to branch. It’s unusual for a hawk to start from that cross and come inside the nature preserve, let alone linger the way it did. But finally, after all that, he decisively jumped down into some scrub only a few feet from me and started kicking through it as if he had gone on a Saturday night bender and was hoping to find his car keys. Once he was in that scrub, literally kicking at the twigs and growth, he looked very tiny and silly, and he must have realized that, because it didn’t take long for him to fly off to a more distant tree.

Dork.

April 9, 2022. Cropped from a larger image. Nikon D850 (FX sensor), Tamron 100–400mm at 400 mm, f/8, 1/350, ISO 100.