"Nice try, gramps."

     Nothing like free food to draw a crowd. I slid into some kind of Content Creators Corner at the Democratic National Convention not because I consider myself "a content creator" — though  did ask the doorkeeper, breezing by, "Do newspaper columnists count?" and was told we do — but because I saw they had free soft pretzels. 

      And my backyard, as you might know, has become a rolling orgy of little brown birds flapping and scrabbling around my constantly stocked bird feeder. Sometimes dozens at a time. Nor are they alone. They're are often several rabbits and two or three or four or five squirrels. I'm not happy about it but what can I do? They're hungry.

     I glanced out the kitchen window last Thursday morning and saw this bad boy. All alone. The brown bird shindig had mysteriously moved on. "About time you showed up," I muttered, admiring his fierce hunter's profile. He'd thin the herd.  

     Wrong. No sooner had I snapped this photo — not that good, through the window at a distance — when a development entered, stage left. A young squirrel who had obviously been asleep during the lesson about not being eaten, nudged into the frame and began poking around the seed husks under the feeder, looking for seeds that had fallen to the ground. Those brown birds, in their frenzy, are sloppy eaters. 

    "This'll be quick," I thought, anticipating what was to come. But it wasn't. To be honest, the hawk seemed to barely notice the squirrel. Then he did. It looked like this:

     If ever a hawk had easy pickings, this had to be it. But hawks are designed to dive bomb prey from a great height. This narrow gap didn't allow him to get up a head of steam. Plus there was the obstacle of the feeder, whose anti-squirrel defenses — a baffle and length of PVC pipe — you may now pause to admire 

    When the hawk made its move, it turned out that little squirrel was not so oblivious after all. He bolted under the protection of the fire pit, and some kindling stacked around it, while the hawk flopped and flapped after him, quite ineffectively.

     The amazing part was that the squirrel didn't even wait for the hawk to go away. After the encounter, he was back nosing the seed leavings as if to say, "Nice try gramps." The hawk flew off, no doubt disgusted with himself, in search of less nimble prey.