Later, That Same Day

Last evening I took a round-trip a few miles west, which has become a bit of routine the last couple months. The birdless monotony was broken by an American Kestrel within about 100 feet of a house, a rarity in my (limited) experience. A hawk flew back east across the same house last week, and, as I watched, I was offered assistance from a goodly resident, so I was loathe to again linger.
Just around the next corner, a red tail hawk flew over the road, and my windshield, low. And mobbed by fifteen LBJ's - Little Brown Jobs. What's a red tail so beset to do? Fly into some trees, where I lost sight, and where the LBJ's wheeled off, allowing me to tally them.
Returning, I noted the kestrel, moved now, even closer to a house just up the road.
North across IN SR 18 and headed back east, I found 13-14 barn swallows. Superb flyers. Scribble on a sheet of paper, hand it to barn swallows as a flight plan, and they will zag every zig. It befuddles one to find any logic, but they surely and absolutely know their business, and never even brush each other.
This evening I retraced the route, without the kestrel, red tail, or barn swallows. Miami CR E1200S crosses little Sugar Creek, a trib of Honey Creek, and on the north side there is a pool about the size of your house, sans garage. In that pool, with no particular place to go, are carp in the 2, 3, even 4-pound range.
When the wind is down, I always stop and watch, suppressing bad thoughts from my childhood concerning carp.
While I was looking at them this evening, a bird crossed the road in a flash of underside white and landed low on a wire fence. The bird recrossed the road and landed on a soybean stalk (!), then flew back to the fence. Intrepid as always, armed only with my little Nikons, in the gloaming, I crept ever closer (uhm, in my truck), until the bird had had enough.
Based on subsequent research, that bird was an Eastern Kingbird, a First!, bringing my lifelist to, maybe, 43.
I chose to follow Sugar Creek to the next downstream bridge (on Miami Co. S700E). At the intersection, an Indigo bunting did a dead dive from 18 feet, flared his wings, and alit in a cut wheat field with nary a dustmote.
Falcons of America, notably the Peregrine (poster child to curb DDT) and the gyrfalcon, do what is most inelegantly called a "stoop". (Other falcons do this, including the Prairie Falcon, but I am more conversant with the Peregrine and the gyr.) The falcon climbs in circles to an altitude of 1000 feet and more, then actually powers into a dive (the stoop), assisted by the 32 feet/second/second pull of gravity to speeds absolutely unheard of in the non-mechanized world, and strikes prey on the wing. Prey may be up to 7X, 8X, or even 10X, the weight of the falcon.
Somehow the falcon manages to bear the full force of this magnificent power dive onto its prey, with minimal, or no, shock to itself.
How a bird can possibly do the calculus, without a computer, choose the correct altitude, the power to apply to the stoop, then calculate in full power dive the prey's location, speed, and thus extrapolate the exact point of impact, and instantaneously decelerate at and through that point, is much too much for a birdbrain to even consider.
Walking my dogs early one morning, I caught sight of a pigeon overhead, truckin', 20 -25mph, and he flies up under the eave of a granary, full speed, until he's like five feet away, throws up his wings, and sticks it. On the ledge, two point, not even a correction shuffle.
Birds are pretty cool. And the show is free.