Coming home from lunch yesterday, I heard the tell-tale screech of a red-tailed hawk from my yard. Fun fact – when you hear a sound effect on a TV show or movie that’s supposed to be an eagle, it’s actually a red-tailed hawk.

I know the sound pretty well – I’ve long been interested in birds of prey, and we live near the Wakarusa Wetlands, which means there’s actually a considerable amount of wildlife in the area. I once saw a dead muskrat in the street near our house, which is an odd thing to find so far from bodies of water.

The screech repeated and was close enough that I wanted to see the bird (biophile, me) so I walked down a house on the block and found it sitting on top of what looked like a squirrel nest. I caught motion across the street, and spotted another red-tailed hawk snapping branches off a tree. I put two and two together, and realized that what I thought was a squirrel nest was in fact a hawk nest in progress!

These new neighbors delight me to no end; I love that wildlife feels comfortable enough to raise families in my neighborhood. We’ve got a healthy population of bats in our bat box. I see mama possum about regularly, and there’s the Fattest Raccoon In the World that I see coming and going via a sewer grate. We have a pair of owls that sex it up outside our house fairly often too. Breezedale is for animal lovers, apparently.

I’m here for it.