I spent a couple of hours this morning in the garden before it got too hot to be out in the sun. By eleven it was already over.

But I knew it would be an eventful morning from the moment I got to my garden gate and saw that Merde Man— the Mad Defecator, as Tony has dubbed him—had returned, and had graced my gate with the gift of a steaming wet deuce. A little off-center, which is not like him, but then I have let the porcelain berry vines grow wild over my fence, and the gate's a little hard to find if you don't know where it is. He got within a foot of it.

We had been wondering where he'd gone, hadn't seen him so far this year, so it was a relief to know that he is back. And healthy, from the looks of his stool sample.

After I disposed of that, I got down to weeding and watering. I harvested some wonderful-smelling sage...


... and was weeding the junglier bits of the bed...


... when an object roughly the size and coloration of a Welsh corgi fell from nowhere, landing about ten feet from me.

Well, that's odd, I thought. Not a cloud in the sky, either.

But then it turned to greet me, and I saw that it was not a corgi. It was a hawk! Zounds! I had never met one up close and in person!

He didn't seem as excited to see me. I think he wanted me to know that he had me in his sights, though. He was actually very polite, whatever the case. He had spotted his lunch in my garden and had dropped in to pick it up. 

"You weren't going to eat that, were you?"

"No, you go ahead. Want some sage to go with it?"

Actually, I was frozen. With wonder and a kind of fear. There is something primordial in interspecific close-encounters like this. The mammal brain reacts to the presence of birds and reptiles, and vice versa, I'm sure. And while the hawk was being very polite, he was a formidable creature— a powerful predator—and this mammal could picture things getting ugly—like, claw-out-your-eyes ugly—if I turned out to be a less-than-compliant host.

And then there was the issue of the vole—the one he'd spotted from afar, come out of nowhere, and landed on—PHOOMP!—just like that. Vole was a mammal, too.

So that little look of Hawk's also seemed to say, "don't you mammals get any funny ideas, now. I'm just doing my job."

He knew the drill. Animals do. Turns out we all did. Though I'm sure the vole didn't know what hit him.

"We cool?" Hawk said.

"It is what it is," I replied.

He heaved himself off right over my head, and disappeared beyond the big willow trees.

Nature. Human-, herb-, hawk-, and vole-. Gotta love it.