I often take time to refocus my commitment to learning about our one-world community of life. I sit quietly on my patio on the edge of the forest, looking and listening for messages from the wild.

I watch green anoles (“chameleons”) and Texas spiny (rusty) lizards climb trees and mingle with songbirds and butterflies. A nearby nesting cooper’s or broad-winged hawk sometimes shows up and catches something to eat. A few weeks ago, a broad-wing caught a rusty lizard only 20 feet away.

Watching overhead, I admire our Mississippi kites for being the most graceful and acrobatic fliers among all local raptors (eagles, hawks and owls). I marvel at their twisting, turning, wheeling, diving as they grab dragonflies, cicadas and other large insects out of the air and treetops.

A red-tailed hawk takes flight from a fence at Cameron Park Zoo.
Jerry Larson / Waco Tribune-Herald file

In migration north from their winter homes in South America, dozens of them roost together in my educational forest. Like all daytime migrating raptors, kites sail on the wind, hardly flapping, but stop for a day or two to eat at sites along the way.

Why don’t local Mississippi kites dive on people in defense of their nest like they do in West Texas? Those folks know to watch out for them in parks and golf courses, but their kites don’t often nest in suburban yards like ours do.

In Woodway, the kites are strictly yard nesters. I remind neighbors that they “pay their way” by eating large insects that eat garden plants and providing aerial “dances.”

Mississippi kites first nested locally in 2002 and their population has increased. Last year, Nancy and I counted seven nests on our early-morning, two-mile walk in Woodway.

Kites arrive in late April to early May and exit southward in mid-August or early-September. Unlike other local hawks, they are not replaced in winter by “snowbird” cousins.

Outbreaks of warning calls by blue jays tell me when those northern hawks arrive.

Broad-winged hawks were our earliest colonists, first nesting here in 1975. They return from the tropics near the end of March. We know of four or five local forest-nesting pairs per year, one only 200 feet from my house.

I like these 15-inch-long, grayish brown hawks and greet them again in the tropics in winter. Broad-winged and red-shouldered hawks have black and white banded tails, but the larger red-shoulders add rufous-orange wing patches.

They like to nest in trees along creeks and rivers and eat water snakes.

The bird-predator specialist among local forest-nesters is the cooper’s hawk, but like all hawks, it also eats other things.

I once watched two fledgling screech owls grow up 30 feet from a cooper’s nest with hungry chicks. Of course, the owlets weren’t active in daylight, whereas hawks are only diurnal. I’m sure that sitting quietly during the day, mimicking a broken tree branch, contributed to owlet survival. Moreover, no hawks I’ve watched ever hunted within a few hundred feet of their nests.

Winter raptors include sharp-shinned hawks, 11-inch-long cousins of the larger cooper’s hawks. Both stay hidden in trees and make dashes for unsuspecting targets.

In this era of bird feeders and bird baths, guess what happens? I have caught, banded and released “sharpies” and coopers by leaving songbirds as decoys next to empty chambers in my bird trap. Of course, the hawks and songbirds were marked and released.

A hawk perches above its nest.
File photo

Overhead circling (not aerobatics) typifies our open-country red-tailed and swainson’s hawks. They spot “targets” and dive straight down on prey, such as the fox squirrel I saw lifted from its treetop leaf nest.

They also follow farmers plowing and harvesting grain to grab suddenly exposed mice and rats.

In the countryside we also have colorful American kestrels, our small (9 inches), tree hole-nesting falcons. And in winter, their similar-sized merlin cousins arrive from the north.

Another local nesting falcon is the crested caracara, the bird perched in a cactus holding a snake on Mexico’s national flag. It is red-faced and white-necked, with a black head crest and body. They sometimes scavenge road-killed animals.

Caracaras also kill some prey, as do black vultures, the black-headed species with white wing patches. The larger turkey vultures have red on the head and can smell rotting, roadway “dinners” up to a mile away. Vultures and raptors are not related and all are protected by state law.

These birds and other wildlife belong to all of us and folks like me that study them must be certified. My tagging (banding) permit is from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service because so many species cross national borders. My handling and collecting permit is from Texas Parks and Wildlife.