Night Hawk

So here's something unusual. A hawk sitting at the table on my front porch...

My job occasionally (okay, all too frequently) makes me get up in the middle of the night. Most nights, I get up, and working through bleary eyes and a raspy voice, I fix whatever lame "emergency" has come up. (You'd think we were running life support systems, or missile guidance operations...)

But one night a couple weeks ago, I was startled to see this rather large raptor out the front window. That woke me up. He stayed for a while, unaware of, or at least unconcerned with, my presence. Even the cat walking into the room didn't seem to impress him. It was pretty dark even with the porch light on, but from what I could tell, I'm guessing it's a red tailed hawk.

The photo is blurry, and had to be brightened quite a bit in Photoshop. I imagine a lot has been lost in the upload too, but you get the idea. I was too lazy/sleepy/unmotivated to get out the tripod and get a proper picture in such low light. It's hard to feel like a photographer at 5 am when you had just gotten to bed at 2 am from the last "emergency."

Yeah, my job is not good. But at least on one occasion, I got the small reward of seeing a hawk up close.