As soon as I stepped out the door for a walk this morning, I heard a lot of crows making a huge racket down the street. They were perched on a telephone pole, flying up and swooping around like they were trying to scare off a hawk.

Of course I walked toward them to see what was going on.

By the time I reached the end of the block, the crows had given up and flown off. But I noticed people were out in their front yards looking up at a tree. It turns out the crows had been trying to scare off a hawk that had killed a pigeon and settled into the tree to eat it. At first I could only see the occasional feather raining down, until I moved to where I could see through a gap in the branches.

The hawk was huge. It’s probably one of the hawks that I see around regularly, but most of the time they’re up in the sky or perched high enough I don’t have any sense of their scale.

People were still out watching (and the crows hadn’t returned) when I decided to continue on my walk. Usually I see the red-tailed hawks out by the nearest school field or the greenbelt by the power transmission lines, and I only see the smaller cooper’s hawks along the residential streets.