Today, while I was out, I encountered this hawk. I’ve seen a lot of them around here, gliding high above. While hunting perhaps. I never got a good shot of one, until now. In fact, I got over 100 “good shots.” This was the best one. After sitting still for about 5 minutes, it flew away.

Hawk Spreading Wings on Tree Branch

Later that day, I also found a mourning dove with a broken wing, so I caught it and brought to a wildlife rehabilitator.

After about a month, I contacted the wildlife rehabiliatator, to find out how she was doing. He said she had begun flying again. So we picked her up, in order to release it back in its original neighborhood. The rehabilitator thought that was weird apparently. However, as I understand it doves and pigeons mate for life, and the rehab was about 60 miles away us. Nevertheless, he agreed, so that’s what we did!

When we got back in our neighborhood, we opened the cardboard box top like the rehabilitator recommended…

Initially, she wouldn’t fly away. We waited and waited.

Eventually, we decided to put the box on its side… and when we gently nudged her, she took off!

But only about 20 feet away, before landing again. It became clear that she still could not fly yet, because she lost a lot of feathers while in captivity for a month. We didn’t know what to do… there was no way I was going to be able to capture her again. There was a big bush nearby that I was hoping she would go to until her family found her. I didn’t want to terrorize her. So we left her alone, and we prayed.