One of the advantages to working at home is that, when you take a break to stretch your legs and get some air in the back yard, if you see a red-tail hawk pinwheeling around the thermal rising above your hill, you can rush back into the house and grab your camera.
She was magnificent. (I don’t know for sure if it was a male or female, and what I find online is “females are generally bigger,” which is spectacularly useless when you only have one with nothing to compare it to.)
And then, in a heartbeat…
…she spotted something, wheeled around…
…tucked her wings…
…and dove. Incredibly fast.
I can’t help but think that tucked like that, her silhouette reminds me of nothing so much as an SR-70, which was designed to go Mach 3+.