This is what the business end of a hawk coming at you at close to a hundred miles an hour looks like. Since hawks this size can often attain dive speeds of 120+ miles per hour the speed estimate for this guy is based on the ‘Holy Crap” method where you suddenly realize he’s diving at you and your first thought is “Holy Crap I bet he’s doing a hundred miles an hour”.

There are things to pay attention to when you’re being photo bombed by a hawk and I’ll present them in order.

• Put camera up to face
• Stick eye to viewfinder
• Remove lens cap due to no image appearing
• Put finger on shutter
• Ask camera politely to FOCUS
• Do everything possible to keep hawk in viewfinder
• Press shutter – a lot
• Duck

This strafing of innocent civilians is unusual as much of the population around here is armed and touchy about stuff like this. The only reason this hawk behaved like this that I can imagine, is that they are predators and usually hungry and I’ve been told by normally reliable sources that my moustache looks like a mouse rather casually draped across the lower half of my face. Even so, hawks have been around long enough to know that mice draped across a humans face is out-of-bounds. That’s what evolution is for, to keep stuff like face bombing hawks from happening, regardless of whether it is mouse adorned or not. So the only other conclusion one can draw is that it is simply nuts.

Some of you are bound to ask “Well What kind of hawk was it?” and the only thing I’m sure of is that it is a member of the Hawkii hostilicus branch of weird-ass, people hating, I could put your eye out you know, hawks. I’m not certain if this is an off-shoot of our regular grumpy hawks, or a whole new species. I think I’m going with the new species thing just because that would be cooler than our regular hawks just going around the bend.

So the next time you’re going to the store for pizza and some Honeycrisp apples and you see a hawk looking at you funny, just stay in the car. If you have to get out and take a picture of it then please follow my list of things to pay attention to above. Either that or quickly shave your moustache off. Remember, Stay Safe out there.