THE ANNUAL HAWK MIGRATION IS ON

EVERY YEAR AT THIS TIME Gerard Manley Hopkins poem
Pied Beauty comes to mind.

“Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle trim.
All things counter, original spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He farthers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.”

The reason this poem comes to mind today is because the annual hawk migration is in progress overhead.

Every March, as soon as the wind begins to blow from the south, hawks that have migrated individually to Mexico last Fall begin to migrate up north en masse.

The sky overhead is filled with soaring hawks. None of them are moving their wings. They soar in circles yet their circular pattern moves northward with the wind. They are at all altitudes. The lowest are only a few hundred feet overhead. The highest are up so high (perhaps two or three thousand feet) that they are mere specks in the sky.

The migration will pass overhead in one day and then it is gone. I doubt that the hawks will eat until they reach their nesting destination in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and points north all the way to Canada.

It is truly a spectacular sight! Glory to God!