Today it rained cats & dogs in my neighborhood. Yesterday was a perfect Indian Summer day and I spent several hours reading and watching our hawk circling slowly overhead. It brought back memories from 10 yrs. ago when I went to VT for a few days in Sep. One similarly gorgeous day when Daughter & son-in-law were at work and grandsons in school or day care I hiked Mt. Philo. Though a modest hill, it is the highest point in the Champlain Valley between the Greens and Dacks. There was just one other human there watching the sky with binoculars and writing his observations in a notebook. We both enjoyed the silence, sun, and beauty of the day for a half hour before speaking. He was watching migrating hawks and tallying it in a notebook. We talked. I commented on how effortlessly the hawks circled on thermals. "Those are the locals, looking for prey. They are about 1000 ft. up. The migrators are another thousand feet above." He handed me his binoculars. "Look there at those 3". I looked and was stunned. They never moved their wings and yet traversed our piece of sky astonishingly fast. "They wait for a favorable wind from the north and can be over your house in VA in 3 days." I was amazed. That's 600 miles in 3 days. I had always thought that migrating birds ran a great risk of waiting too long and if they did, they were doomed to slow winter starvation. 3 days!

The hawk watcher had grown up in NJ and gone to UVM. He had fallen in love with skiing and the Green Mtns. and the culture. He was perhaps 45 and had used up his knees hucking cliffs. He was unemployed but had cobbled together a series of sub professional salaried jobs interspersed with periods of unemployment so as to remain in the place he loved. "I'll survive this one too. I'll be walking these hills and watching my hawks for many years yet."