A View to a Kill

In this photo: a juvenile red-tailed hawk enjoys a tasty lunch of gray squirrel, in the very center of the Penn State University Park campus.

I had a meeting on campus Monday morning, and when we finished the meeting and I left to go catch my bus at the library, I decided to take a different route to get to the library than I usually do. It's Thanksgiving week, and things are looking pretty deserted on campus, as many students have already left for home to celebrate the holiday. So the empty campus called to me - holiday weeks and breaks between semesters are perfect times to capture some on-campus photos without lots of people in them.

It had been a while since I had walked among the various science lab buildings, and so I cut between Mueller Lab, North and South Frear, and Whitmore Lab. I was walking down the sidewalk, when I noticed a young woman come out of one of the buildings and start pointing her cell phone at something on the ground in front of her, trying to get a photo of it.

When I looked more closely, I realized what an exceptional event I was about to witness: there on the ground, about six feet in front of the young woman, sat a red-tailed hawk eating a gray squirrel for an early lunch.

I was absolutely stunned and delighted! I've seen many things on our campus (and I've even seen one of the football stadium goal posts be paraded through campus and downtown on a Saturday night by a jubilant throng of fans, back in the glory days of the 1980s), but I had never before seen a raptor eat its prey in the very heart of campus.

So I did what any self-respecting girl with a camera would do. First, I got out my camera and took a few shots of the hawk with the zoom before stepping closer. Then I approached the hawk quietly and slowly, and found that it was so intent on its meal that I was able to get to within six to twelve feet of it without disturbing it.

And then I stood there for about fifteen minutes, fully observing the hawk enjoy its meal, and I took about 175 photos. Just because I could. I took a bunch of shots from the sidewalk above the hawk and then I walked around it and got on my knees and shot a few more.

It was an unbelievable experience, to see this bird from such a close vantage point. I could practically count the number of polka-dots on its fancy bloomers!

It was fun to watch the looks on people's faces as they walked past and looked. And then looked AGAIN, when they suddenly realized what they were seeing! And then the head-shake, and another look. "Now there's something you don't see every day," I said to one gentleman; "A hawk, eating a squirrel's brains right on campus!" The food chain at work, right here and now!

At one point, I saw something gray moving in the background of my shot, and I realized that another (alive) gray squirrel had just passed quickly through my frame. It moseyed around looking for nuts, and then it suddenly stopped: WHOA! That's some HUGE bird there! And it's eating a . . . ARGH!!!!! And then that squirrel took off so fast, it practically left skid-marks on the ground!

And is that fuzzy gray thing in the upper right corner of this photo possibly the tail of a fleeing gray squirrel, who has just thought better of its choice of lunch location? I'm not sure - it looks a little fuzzy - but I think it just might be!

My camera has 35x zoom, which would have been well equipped to capture the photos from a much further distance. But on this day, I didn't need any zoom at all - I was practically standing right on top of the scene, watching it unfold!

Eventually, I had to leave to catch my bus. And I did, though it was hard to tear myself away. I got to the library and checked the electronic board that lists the departure times for buses, and discovered that I had a twenty-minute wait for my bus. It was cold out (about 25 degrees F, or about -4 C) and I was finally done with my camera, so I decided to put my gloves on and sit down and wait. I reached in my pocket for my gloves, only to discover that I only had one pink glove! Rats! I had lost one!

But I knew just where I must have dropped it. And with twenty minutes to bus time, I had just enough time to walk back over to where I'd seen and photographed the hawk. Sure enough, as I rounded the corner, I spotted my bright pink glove on the ground.

So I walked over and picked it up. And I looked at the spot where the hawk and squirrel had been, only to find that spot EMPTY. No bird. No squirrel. I shook my head, looked around. No sign of either one, anywhere. It was almost as though it had never happened. But I have 175 pictures that say that it did!

The soundtrack to accompany this photo . . . you guessed it before you got this far, didn't you? Duran Duran, with the James Bond movie theme, A View to a Kill.