The songbirds and buzzards have returned. Winter is over, no matter what the weather does! In truth, many of the songbirds don't migrate and I see more and more buzzards over the winter as well. But last weekend, morning broke with two glorious sunrises and the songbirds were happy and making noise. It was nothing like the cacophony we will hear from April to October, but it was still a joy to hear. A woodpecker was pounding a tree in the background, and it reminded me of that feeling you get as a kid when you return to a special vacation spot, and you feel like you are coming home.
That afternoon a soar of buzzards circled over a empty farm field near my house. Buzzards is the collective term we use in Ohio (probably the whole Midwest) to refer to Turkey Vultures and Black Vultures. Interestingly, when you see a group of them in the sky, they are referred to as a Soar. When they sit together in a tree, they are called a Committee, and when you see them on a ground feeding on a carcass (Remember writers: carcass is always a three times value in the Scrabble game of life!) they are called a Wake.
Growing up in Ohio, we observed a ritual known as the Buzzards return to Hinkley (a small town in Ohio.) It happens on March 15 every year, recorded all the way back to 1820. My parents took us when we were little (because we were that family. We also went to the Steam Thresher show but that's another post.) When you're a little kid and your parents are excitedly pointing out birds sitting in a tree or circling overhead you just nod and go about your business because we came here for that? I'd go now, but I've already seen the buzzards in Centerburg, so I don't need to feel superior by driving to Hinkley.
I have written before about the red tail hawk that lives near our house. In the winter she likes to float over the tall grass behind our house, hunting for little critters in the field. She is able to move so slowly by flying against the wind that she literally hangs in the air while she searches the field for prey. She can do this for hours at a time, in all kinds of weather. In the summers, she prefers to perch on telephone poles and sun herself while she scans the ground for dinner.
I feel obligated to point out that the use of the pronoun 'she' to refer to the red tail hawk is not some kind of DEI nonsense. Female hawks tend to be larger than males and relatively easy to identify through visual inspection. Speaking of calling a hawk a hawk, I saw a performance of The Laramie Project last night, put on by the Otterbein University Theatre and Dance Department. It was a tremendous performance and brought back to me the casual hatred of LBGTQIA people that was so prevalent in the late 1990s. That is why we cannot let this society return to a place where it is okay to spout hate about those who are different or marginalized. I read a stunning pushback on the OCR's Dear Colleague letter yesterday, written by the president at Trinity Washington University pointing out the moral failure of that letter. You can read it in Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
I cannot abide cruelty.
Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck!
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