Letting the Day Come to You

There are a host of reasons for spending a day or many days at a hawk watch. Many of those are readily perceived and understood: the excitement of thousands of Broad-winged Hawks in the sky at one time, a good look at a migrating Golden Eagle and the first Osprey of the season.

Underlying these fairly accessible pleasures are some other, perhaps more profound but usually subliminal reasons for what we do. One of these has to do, I think, with simply letting the day come to you.

In a way that's almost oriental and meditative, hawk watching entails patience and a willingness to allow the passage of time and the movements of a discrete day to unfold without aggressively trying to influence what happens in it. This letting go while still paying close attention to temperature, wind direction, cloud cover, visibility and other movements of the day returns to us a connectedness to the natural world that's rare in most of our lives. I think it's this feeling of connectedness, in this way and others, that calls us to the hawk watch, even when the wind is in the east and the hawks are spread out and few.