New birds

Today we went to a new place for a walk, and we got to watch a kingfisher for awhile. I couldn’t help thinking of the Hopkins poem about how “kingfishers catch fire,” one illustration of a created thing “flinging out broad its name”:

The other night, the girls and I saw an eastern towhee for the first time. I’d heard this bird before, but this was the first time I ever got my eye on it.

It had its eye on us, too. The light wasn’t great, obviously.

We saw (and heard) a hawk earlier this week that I thought was a broad-winged hawk — the one I saw when we were in the Adirondacks. It has a unique, whistling call, and it obliged us by circling low over the back yard as we stood there gaping upward. This evening, I thought I spotted it again, sitting in the neighbor’s tree. But it didn’t make a sound, and its tail is not striped as I thought it should be. So the jury is still out on what this bird is… Let me know if you can clear up the confusion! If it were up to me, I’d dub it the tree-bark hawk, for obvious reasons.

My 7-year-old set her ceramic rabbit in the middle of the back yard in an effort to attract it so we can get a closer look. :-) The hawk is in for some dental problems if it works.