Watch the sky.

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.