It was a chilly morning—quite close to genuine frostiness—and I headed out early to see if I could find and capture any touches of silver. There wasn't, however, much more than a hint of ice on the ridge, but there was something else... something completely unexpected. As I was walking downhill towards the millpond, I noticed a dark shape moving low over the grass where there was once woods and managed meadows. The flier was clearly some kind of hawk, but it definitely wasn't the Red-tailed that sometimes perches in the trees below our place, and it also wasn't one of the Red-shouldereds that live in the woods. I had the wrong lens, the encounter was over quickly, and the large bird, floating as elegantly as a butterfly, soon disappeared. The pictures are, alas, not good, but they're good enough to see that the outline likely belongs to a Marsh Hawk, and if you look at the place where the tail meets the body, there's that diagnostic white spot. In the 34 years we've lived on the ridge, we've never seen this species here. You just never know what you'll discover, which, of course, is why I'm out there, open-eyed, every day.