Noticing

The temptation on long drives is to space out and plug in to the nearest device. Instead, I like to count birds.

The red-tailed hawk is a large roadside denizen that can reliably be found hunting rodents above grass mowed short by the highway. I found 12 on this 100-mile stretch of Highway 57 in Southern Illinois.

More work is needed, as we scientists like to say, to get at ecology things like habitat preference, abundance or distribution. This hawk hunt was really about noticing - the way the light changes at dusk, how the cornfields are broken up by woods.

I felt like I’d been to a place instead of just passing through. I’m grateful to these masters of flight for helping to ground me in the present.