Special Delivery

I love to get the mail. It’s a habit left over from a long-ago childhood, when the box, as likely as not, would yield an honest-to-goodness letter, and even bills and other official correspondence arrived in envelopes addressed by hand.

That’s changed, of course. But here in Tucson, if you’re a birder, the walk to the mailbox never fails to deliver. Yesterday’s stroll the quarter mile down the driveway was quiet at first, with just the usual Gambel’s Quail and Mourning Doves skittering out of my way. At the mailbox itself, though, a dense palo verde concealed a huge amount of fuss, with Ladder-backed and Gila Woodpeckers and Verdins mobbing something obviously large, slow, and scary. And out popped a Harris’s Hawk, then a second, then a third. The trio perched teetering on the wires, then moved to firmer perches on the crossbars of a telephone pole. And the smaller birds went on their way, no doubt with stories to tell.