Falcon

Good morning. 

Where I live there is a falcon that hangs around. I kid you not. A falcon.

Sometimes he has surprised me by staking out a spot on the rooftop garden, and I'll see him perched on a planter at the other end of the row I'm weeding. I usually then go weed somewhere else.

Not a picture of my particular falcon, but the scene with the city in the background is about right.

But this morning, he chose to land and camp out on my window A/C. You know, the typical window-mount A/C unit with the back half sticking out the window.

This one is also perched on a window, but he's a cute baby. I had his mama looking through my window.

So when my eyes fly open this morning, I'm staring at a black beady eye about two feet away from my pillow. Because the back half of the A/C may be outside, but the FRONT half is right by my bed, and in my fuzzy mind I actually forgot about the window and thought he was coming right at me.

Okay so he didn't look as threatening as this, but CLOSE.

And then it shrieks at me. That is a terrifying sound first thing in the morning when you have forgotten there is a window, folks.

You know how in old westerns, you'll hear the hawk cry across the abandoned frontier town, and it symbolizes the raw, lonely, power of the desert?

When you hear that shriek next to your ear, it symbolizes more the raw power of making you pee your pants.

Suffice to say, I am up and at 'em today at work, and I didn't even need coffee to do it!

Credits for images:
http://www.photo-dictionary.com/photofiles/list/5088/12911saker_falcon.jpg
http://www.thedailygreen.com/cm/thedailygreen/images/NZ/nyc-hawk-032609-lg.jpg
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/94MTPPwCgJk/0.jpg
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2010/07/08/witness-worker-struck-falcon.html