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| I love the clicking clatter of their wings |
Flies that is. We have never in our lives seen so many. There are thousands upon thousands of them, up in the fields, over by the barn, and here by the house.
A look up though the binoculars at a soaring Red-tailed Hawk reveals a dozen, laddered up to the sky between lens and bird. They can't be seen by the unaided eye, but they are there, hunting, always hunting. They fly in storied ranks before the sitting porch, bent on buggy dining.
Every single field is patrolled by a net of them, a deadly web of voracious appetites, devouring insects in untold numbers.
I sat on a bale, watching the boss make hay the other day and saw them, jinking and jiving, grabbing beetles and skeeters and who knows what else. You could actually watch them swerve for an insect and then resume course.
Most of them are huge, front-end-heavy green things that never land long enough for me to even get a good look, let alone a photo. One flew right past my face revealing glowing golden eyes like some metallic monster machine. There are a handful of the ones photographed, but mostly the big greens. Do they hatch in the river I wonder....I have never seen anything like them.
***Update: I think the big greens are female and young Eastern Pondhawks (what a great name!) The males are blue and I have seen a few blue ones. How cool is that?
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