I’ve spotted it twice now, once in the winter and once in the early fall (see photo below).  If the two sightings were one and the same bird, it seems we have a goshawk in the neighborhood.

The goshawk is a large hawk, with a reputation for secretiveness, and among falconers, for its unruly nature.  It’s fast and graceful in flight (look for two wing beats: “flap, flap — glide”).  You can remember it by its light shoulder and belly, dark red eye and pronounced eye-stripe (hard to see in my photo above, but easy here), and by its appearance in the breathtaking H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald, as well as this poem by Hillsdale poet Peter Kane Dufault:

Goshawk

That harbinger of God’s hardness,
North American Goshawk —
storm-grey above, ice-grey beneath,
segment of a winter azimuth —
detached herself from this morning and
seized a black hen and caromed
thirty yards through the soft snow, wrenching
feathers and flesh out, too
blood-crazy to kill clean. . . .

Tell me
if it’s not hard how a haggard
hasn’t even the hangman’s mercy
but tears the heart out alive — that she
should have been made so;

and so, too, that when the dog
ran yapping and drove her off,
the grey crucifer levitated
in such a cold pride of windblown
lightness over the tines of the trees

you’d have forgiven her, even
if she could have torn
in that worse way there is:
with a word, never breaking the skin.