Last week I was surprised to see a killing take place across the street from my house. I was sitting on my porch reading the newspaper when it happened. At first I didn't even realize what I was seeing. But a few moments later, there was no mistaking it. I'd just seen a hawk kill a mouse.

I'm not used to seeing birds of prey here in the city. My neighborhood is home to lots of squirrels, chipmunks, the occasional racoon, some mice, a fair number of crows, and more songbirds than you can count. We even had an honest-to-god wild turkey roaming the streets here several months ago. But not a lot of hunters. Which is why this took me a bit by surprise.

The hawk took his meal to a nearby tree and proceeded to eat it. I didn't have a great view of it, and I don't actually know a hawk from a falcon, so I can't be any more specific about what kind it was. It was fairly small, about the size of a crow, which is why I didn't immediately recognize it as a bird of prey when it touched down on the lawn across the street, then took off.

OK, so last night I turned on the TV to see what TiVo had recorded for me, and in among the new Fall-season episodes was a program that had been on PBS about the family of red-tailed hawks that took up residence in Central Park back in the 1990s. It was an interesting program, describing how the couple nested on one of the buildings that surround the park, how their children learned to fly, and so on. It also talked about the phenomenon that surrounded them, the throngs of people who gathered to watch them, follow their progress week after week, and generally treat them like a movie-star couple or British royals. These people gushed about how amazing it was to see something so truly wild in the city.

I thought about the hawk I'd seen the week before. And my own reaction to it.

Yes, it was noteworthy, and I thought some of the same sorts of things that these New Yorkers said. But after watching my hawk for several minutes as he ate, and snapping a few photos in hopes of identifying what kind of hawk he was... I moved on. Because it really wasn't that big a deal. I see hawks out hunting all the time on the highway between here and Lansing. It's not that unusual to see them along certain roads around here, like the one going around the nearby lake. I've even seen an eagle. We have wild-ness here. It's part of our lives.

But apparently the people of New York City are so separated from it, that when it does appear in their lives, it's a huge Event. How sad.