5:05 a.m. 51 degrees, wind E 2 mph. Sky: thinly overcast with highlights; a light drizzle. I enter wet woods on the eastern rim of Coyote Hollow and walk to the goshawk nest. Deep green shade; no mosquitos. The female calls softly (softly for a goshawk, anyway). Sees me, calls louder, and then escorts me through the woods at a respectful distance, always just below the canopy. I stop. No action in the nest. Not even a visible shoulder. Have chicks fledged? Have they been predated, which would be a serious reversal of fortune? Hard to tell. She settles on a pine limb hundred feet from the nest, continues admonishing me. We—the hawk, the nest, and I—form an equilateral triangle.
She's exquisite. Fine-gray barring, scrimshaw, on white undersides; back as dark as dusk. Cream-white undertail coverts, wet and splayed, hang around her legs like a mini-skirt and contrasts with long black and gray striped tail . . . a rudder of sorts that permits breakneck turns. Goshawk never takes her red eyes off me. Stares me down. Big head capped in black. Face striped: black masks her eyes; white above. Throat like chest whitish and finely barred. Body tapered at both ends, thick in the middle, a well-muscled, football of a bird that flies like a fighter jet capable of turning on a dime, literally . . . forty-miles an hour around trunks and limbs.
An unsheathed encounter: nervy blue jay, the epitome of chutzpah, calls, appears, torments the hawk. Sends her to another perch, and me to home considering my first delinquency of the day.