This morning I watched a Falco sparverius, an American Kestrel, drop from a wire onto the berm and, apparently, come up empty. This is not a big surprise, as 25 to 35 percent of attacks are failures. This in the East: the wide-open West is less fruitful.

As I approached a bridge just north of town this evening, a bird dropped into the creek. I stopped, got out(!), and looked, but never saw the bird come up. I spooked five UNK ducks (don't fret; had I glassed them for an hour they would likely still be unidentified) and as I stood, exhausted from my efforts, a Great Blue Heron came in for a landing. The high arch of the wings is most awesome, as the bird's mass requires all the wingspan and its lift to support it in a glide.

I saw several kestrels today, and am heartened, not just because I want one, I need one, I crave one to fly, but they are just the best to observe, from any vantage, from any angle.
I was sure I saw a Falco columbarius, a Merlin on the top of a pole. It was a wanna. I desperately want to see a Merlin and instead of determining how it was a Merlin, I focused on why it wasn't.
For roughly 100,000 years, humans have fancied answers to questions that have no answers. My Merlin could have been any falcon. He was surely a kestrel.
With the thousands of questions we have answered in the last 150 years, people cling to, totally embrace, the most unlikely explanations for the most existential concerns.
There are no ghosts, there are no spirits, there are no angels, there is no heaven, there is no hell, there is no devil, there is no god.
Accept these most simple truths, get used to them, and get on with whatever time you have left. It's all you have. Use it. It's all you get.

There is some agreement among biologists that falcons are more closely related to owls than to hawks. A partial explanation may lie in the geological record, with raptors emerging in the Eocene (along with the earliest horse, Eohippus, Hyracotherium, in North America.) No modern falcon fossils exist in the geologic record prior to about 2 million years ago.
The supposed relationship between falcons and owls is to be determined through genome analyses. Such research is in the backseat while really important stuff, like attaching a cloned body to Ted Williams' cryrogenicly preserved, frozen head, is JobOne.

Here is a link to a rather depressing report, "State of the Birds", in PDF. Deal with the page format size, but it beat me.

http://www.stateofthebirds.org/pdf_files/State_of_the_Birds_2009.pdf

A most sobering quote from this report:
"More bird species are vulnerable to extinction in
Hawaii than anywhere else in the United States.
Before the arrival of humans, the Hawaiian
Islands supported 113 bird species unique in the
world, including flightless geese, ibis, rails, and 59
species of Hawaiian honeycreepers.
Since humans arrived, 71 bird species have become
extinct and 31 more are federally listed as
threatened or endangered. Of these, 10 have not
been seen in as long as 40 years and may be extinct.
Humans have introduced many bird species
from other parts of the world: 43% of 157 species
are not native. Among landbirds, 69% are introduced
species."
I don't know if the report refers to all people, or just whites. I do know the brown snake has been a terror for every living thing. Air traffic has been long documented as the brown snake's introduction to paradise.
Adjust your seat to the full, upright position, and ignore that squirming mass around your ankles.

The movie "Hawaii", a film destruction of James Michener's behemoth novel, depicted a memorable scene where a man, distraught over his wife's untimely death, mashed his teeth out on island rock.
If you see this scene, don't count on shaking it any time soon.