Urban legend

January 17, 2017  •  Leave a Comment

New Haven is a wild town. I have, over the many years I worked at Yale, spotted wild turkeys strutting around the Green, heard about coyotes prowling Elm City avenues, watched Red-tailed Hawks sitting atop gargoyles and scanning open space—the Grove Street Cemetery, actually—for rodents and rabbits, and dined on Morel Mushrooms inexplicably growing in the compost-filled moats along College Street. I was in town this gray afternoon for a doctor's appointment, and as I was walking past the Yale-New Haven Hospital entrance on York Street, I got the sighting of wild sightings: a young hawk, probably a Cooper's, coming out of nowhere to snatch an unwary pigeon off the road and then carry it up to a street-side tree for a late-afternoon feast. The accipiter, no doubt completely used to people, was completely oblivious to me, as the hunter sent a shower of feathers cascading to the pavement and I moved very close to the scene, my weatherproof little Fuji in hand. As I documented, I felt a twinge of regret that I hadn't brought my dSLR and supertelephoto combination, but the Fuji managed to capture the action just as surely as the hawk captured its prey.


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