Erratic

Playing catchup everyday. Sammy and I set our alarms to listen to the inauguration speech which was around 2 am on the morning of the 21st out here. Coincidentally this meant it was also two hours into Sammy's birthday. I hope the world does a lot better in his 21st year.

We took  my daughters display stand to her university earlier today as it happened to be a school holiday for Sammy. We were only at the gate for a few seconds as the officious guardmen were not particularly cooperative. When we left there we quickly got something to eat and sat in the car park of a local community area. To my surprise a bloke then stepped out of a car across the way from us with a Gyr falcon on his arm. He strolled over to a tree and sat at the foot of it, then broke out his fags and started to smoke. It was a bit like looking at some wild spirit chained to a fuming rock. I wouldn't normally have attempted polite conversation, but I wasn't sure of the species as it was a juvenile bird and I wanted to see what kind of conversation the rock was capable of. 

Not much. 

I suppose the bloke could have been an off duty falconer protecting an airport from the type of bird damage to planes that twittered its way around the world last week, but his conversation and my enthusiasm for looking at chained birds was not sufficient to carry me to any clear information as to the purpose of the erratic boulder and its feathery sattelite. All I did gather was that the bird was of Canadian parentage and the chap made his own hoods. I must look up and see how much bigger these birds are than peregrines.   

It was more marked as a slightly disturbing encounter as we had chanced to see a big female sparrow hawk from our car earlier on that was making free to harrass pidgeons as we drove into the urban sprawl and my memories of watching Goshawks soaring in our valley were still very clear.