B E B E R E

Aren't some of the most beautiful discoveries made while you're doing other things?

Like a lot of people, I'm sure, I've only seen the Audubon engravings of this fellow.

In other news, Bald Eagles are scheduled to be taken off the Endangered Species list. Though I've never seen one before in the city, I've heard of sightings up in the Middlesex Fells.

As for the red tails and the peregrines? There's a family of peregrines I like observing on my way to work - they swoop across Walnut Street on Prospect Hill hunting, training to hunt, playing. Frightening but so much fun to watch. It's a bad day when I don't see them or my ghetto raptors (the hawks who live in the projects in East Cambridge and hunt pigeons).

Heartening, all this.