One pleasure of canyons comes in the birds who float down along them. Nothing compares to the back of a flying bird who is ordinarily seen only from below. In my birding fantasies -- yes, I am a pitiful creature who has birding fantasies -- I see birds from above.
Today I happened to be standing in the Desert Garden at Balboa Park in San Diego, looking back at the Florida Canyon segment, where I had just walked most of the trails birding. I saw a red-tailed hawk whoosh low along the road there, well below my eye level. I got my cheap travel binoculars on his arc and followed him up the highway, then had one of those sudden recognitions the limited field of view of binoculars causes when a second hawk suddenly appeared.
Two red-tails together on breeding grounds means only three things I know of -- a mated pair, an adult and offspring, or rivals. As one red-tail followed the other through the canyon, then up in air above the horizon, they were both easy to follow in the binoculars' field. Their talons showed and their legs extended, like gunslingers unholstering weapons. They were silent. They split apart, and one slid west down the canyon, toward the sea. Courting?
It was a good day. The remaining hawk was busy -- a sharp-shinned hawk tested him (he was small, so I'm guessing "him") earlier, one of a flight of several circling upward. Also I saw the local expectations, like house finches (paler than back east), bushtits (let the Googlebot enjoy that word), California towhees and the indefatigable, stunningly beautiful Anna's hummingbirds. What is the magenta that covers their throat and forehead like? I decided it is like Chinese embroidery thread, that pinkish unripe mulberry shine. Also yellow-rumped warblers and black phoebes and a soaring (!) harrier. The desert manufactures strangeness in behavior.
Or, from another perspective, it is the behavior that lushness encourages that is strange.
