Falco Peregrinus, Slechtvalken: Hillary of Hilliard Bridge

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

The Falcon and the Squirrel

I came across these superb pictures made by Chad & Chris Saladin.
The pics were shot in April. Hillary of Hilliard Bridge sat in a close tree, when a squirrel started making his way up toward her. She watched intently as the squirrel checked her out from a branch right across where she was perched. Then the squirrel started up her branch. Hillary gave the defensive posture, then lunged a bit toward the squirrel, and he scooted the other direction.
It is as if Hillary is saying: Don't you know who I am? Do you want to end up as my dinner, come on and make my day.
And gone he was the squirrel, a fascinating interaction between raptor and potential prey. Peregrine falcons do catch squirrels. But not like this. The squirrel in a tree is much faster than a peregrine falcon.
But Chris and Chad have seen Hillary dining on a squirrel once.......
The pics are magnificent. Thank you Chris and Chad Saladin!

Splendor

" We need another, and a wiser, perhaps a more mystical,
concept of animals.
Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice,
man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge
and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.

*
We patronize them for their incompleteness,
for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.
And therein we err, and greatly err.
For the animal shall not be measured by man.
*
In a world older and more complete than ours
they move finished and complete,
gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained,
living by voices we shall never hear.
*
They are not brethren.
They are not underlings.
They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time,
fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”
*
Henry Beston