Towheeblog

Some things you may be born to.  Having the reflexes to be great at ping-pong or pro basketball.  Ability to draw well at age 4 or play any music from memory.  Or maybe fly at 70 miles per hour in a raging wind.

Today Albert Ryckman and I watched four juvenile Prairie Falcons practice their aerial arts around the cliff face where they were born.  This is along Harney Lake Road here in Malheur Basin.

Flight fantastic.  Fast and feathered.  Fluid yet forceful.  Fast and free-style.  Loops, arcs, wing-tucked dives. Playing tag, playing falcon versions of wheelies in the sky, chase and scream, perch and take-off, hanging high in a west wind that was chilling the mammal bipeds enviously watching from ground level.  It was over an hour of aerial aerobatics and show-off that kept us in place, kept us cold, but warmed our many cockles.

All this lighted by sunset’s glow and before a stage set of a golden cliff face.