(This was an amazing, astonishing, fantastic, {insert thesaurus here} event. I’m giving you the full-resolution photos – click on any of them to blow them up to download or look at the complete image.)

You can usually find hawks floating around the neighborhood. Red-tail hawks are the common ones, but you also find red-shouldered hawks, Cooper’s hawks, and some kind of “night hawk” that I hear often but haven’t yet been able to ID. We’re adjacent to some large natural, open areas, but even over the more densely populated areas of the city, there are often hawks.

Glorious, spectacular creatures. Usually observed from a considerable distance.

This morning I went out to pick up the first of the trash cans after I got payroll done. (Working from home for more than three years is still a mixed bag.) I saw a big red-tailed hawk just landing on top of this big Italian Cypress tree across the street. (It might also be an Emerald Green Arborvitae, but I digress.) I grabbed the camera and took a few pictures.

Unlike most of the times I see these hawks, this guy wasn’t going anywhere, so I had time to cross the street, walk down the cul-de-sac, and get a bit closer.

Of course, what I really, really wanted to get some photos of him flying, but Murphy’s Law ruled and said that he would take off and fly away when I was walking and had the camera down. *sigh*

A couple hours later, when I went out to get the other trash cans, I saw him circling fairly low overhead and I ran in to get the camera again. That opportunity had passed, but he was just landing in that same tree again.

Again he sat for a minute, then to my amazement he leapt into the air. I started shooting one picture after another.

I think it was about this point that I realized that he wasn’t going to soar around and circle overhead, but was diving. FAST!

Straight. At. Me.

Ten feet away from me? Maybe? Less? I could hear the air whistling through his feathers. I had no idea what was going on, but he went by me, then landed in the bush that surrounds the pole on our front porch, right next to the front door.

I wonder if there wasn’t something in that bush that he was after. One of the bigger lizards? A rat or mouse? A bird’s nest of some sort? I know there are some house finch nests up under the eaves, just like in the back yard (search this site for “finch,” plenty of photos) but I don’t know of anything in that bush.

He gave me the hairy eyeball. I wasn’t doing anything other than shooting photos. Okay, there was that whole drooling thing since my jaw was on the ground…

Look at those claws!

Look at that glorious plumage and the patterns in all of those feathers!

Look at that glorious red tail! And he’s gone, soaring in ground effect about knee height, passing right past me on the other side, again no more than ten feet away.

GOBSMACKED!!!

But wait. After a couple minutes to regain my wits, I remembered that there’s a security camera that looks at the front porch.

Good. It really happened.

My thought at the time was that the hawk might be building a nest in the area, possibly at the top of that tree, and that it had seen me looking at it repeatedly and saw me as a threat. Maybe. But having now seen the pictures and how it was looking into that bush, I’m leaning more toward the idea that it was looking for something in that bush for lunch and I happened to be in the way.

I’ll never know, but either way … WOW!!!