Watch the sky.

[hannah]

Sometimes when someone's clearly looking at something, I'll stop and ask what it is, or try to see what it is they're looking at. If there's two people, it's a good sign it's something interesting. If it's two people and one has a pair of binoculars and the other has an iPhone out, it's pretty much guaranteed a good look.

A red-tailed hawk on a lawn eating a rat is worth a few moments of my time. I wasn't getting up close, and I wasn't going to ask to borrow the binoculars, so I wasn't getting as good a look as either of them. I couldn't see it was a rat, just that the hawk was eating something, and had to rely on their accounts of what was through the lenses. They gave pretty good play-by-play. Its position, the arrangement of limbs, a decent guess at what organs the hawk was chowing down on.

As I told them before I biked off, nature is beautiful, and it isn't pretty.

Comments

[tielan]

Not sure I could have watched that, but hearing it would have been interesting, even if I winced my way through it.

[angrboda]

a decent guess at what organs the hawk was chowing down on
That sounds like something I'd have tried to figure out too. :)