Do you sometimes get the feeling that something is going to go wrong? It happened with an impromptu act with a man exercising his hawks. I took my daughter to a local park because she wanted a go on the playground.
Next to the playground there was this man with boxes stacked up on the grass. Squawking came from the insides of various boxes. It is not every day that you find someone exercising his birds in the local park.
As he let the birds go, he was matter-of-factly talking to a small group of mothers and children, not concentrating fully. I thought something bad was about to occur. And it did.
He let loose the second, who did two loops of the park, skimming my hair on the second run, before disappearing into the wood. No amount of whistling or calling or waving a dummy in the air was going to entice this bird out.
After about five minutes, the wood erupted into a chorus of crows calling. There was also much scrabbling going on in the undergrowth. I thought the hawk was going to kill a crow. But the opposite happened. The hawk shot out of the wood, hugging the ground and cheeping in alarm. He was being closely pursued by four rooks, who were trying to bite his tail off. Brave birds. There must have been some young in the trees.
This was nature at its best.
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