A new bird

The picture of the nickel-iron meteorite below is for scale.


I don’t have a photo of this new avian arrival outside my window because if I had moved even an inch, it would have flown the coop. Therefore the picture of the meteorite. A couple of days ago, the usual end-of-season manna from the ranch arrived. Iced-down picnic coolers filled with lots of goodies descended from on high, the leftovers from our summer season at Florence Lake and the ranch. Part of this largesse was 90 eggs. NINETY! What do you do with NINETY EGGS? At least we can freeze the ten pounds or so of butter. After it thaws it’s just the same as regular butter. All the frozen New York steaks will satisfy the carnivorous lust of our cowboys. The gargantuan chunk of parmesan cheese is certainly welcome and will eventually vanish via our hand-cranked grater over mounds of spaghetti. But eggs don’t like to be frozen unless you break them and stir them a bit and put them in tiny containers like ice cube trays then freeze the little cubes and put them in zip-lock freezer bags. What a pain!

So I boiled twenty of them all at once. (Biggest single batch of eggs boiled by me in my whole life; the thrill was indescribable!) I used the technique that guarantees that the yolks won’t be coated by a blue-green cast. Put the eggs in cold water and heat them to the boiling point. As soon as they boil, set the timer for exactly seven minutes. Ding! The timer goes off and you immediately douse the eggs in water as cold as you can make it. The yolks will be yellow all the way out to their perimeters. Very attractive.

I put the eggs in a zip-closure bag and stuck them in the fridge. The following morning one of the shelves in the fridge collapsed and smashed a couple of the eggs. I ate one, but the other was really smashed, so I put it outside on the rock we use to present food to the local ravens.

This is where the New Bird showed up. From a viewing distance of maybe a trillionth of a parsec, he appeared to be about a cubit, minus a palm, from crown to tail tip. Medium size hawk. He perched on an oak branch outside the window and looked around for maybe a quadrillionth of a year, then dove down and glommed onto the boiled egg, shell and all, and took it away to his dining room.

I couldn’t find our bird book. So for now, it’s a streaky-broken striped on the chest mostly tannish-gray swivel-headed hawk (he sure could swivel his head like an owl). Possibly a boiled-egg-eating California modern-day urban-rural transitional aberration.

Or maybe a Cooper’s Hawk. Yeah. A Cooper’s Hawk.