Red-Shouldered Hawk

My eyes are generally glued to the screen these days as I sit in my office, finishing up the paper due next week. But they do catch peripheral movement: a disruption of the leaves in the back of the yard, where there are still leaves left to rustle. 

On Wednesday, this wasn't just any disruption. It was a bird so large that at first I thought it might be a squirrel. It had landed near a patch of bald earth and appeared to be scratching the ground. But it was almost out of my line of sight and I couldn't be sure. 

Then a shudder of the wings, a springing into air. Either the squirrel had flown or this was a large bird of prey. It landed in the spindly weeping cherry, on a branch that barely seemed large enough to support it. 

And there it sat for many minutes, long enough to take a photograph, to view it through binoculars, to note its markings well enough that I can almost definitely say it was a red-shouldered hawk. Long enough that I could marvel at this beautiful wild thing perched nonchalantly on a tree in the backyard.