While I was walking to the bus this morning ( I do this weekdays. I've a half mile walk to and from the bus stop ) I happened upon a group of morning doves hooting while sitting on a telephone wire. I don't normally pay too much attention to the birds on my walk. I am usually reading or listening to an audio book or something. But today for some reason I decided to walk and just look at everything around me.
The morning doves were hooting away, and being a fan of morning doves, I stopped to take a look at them. I happened to see on the top of the telephone pole I was standing near ( I was a good 10 feet away from it ) a beak protruding over the top edge. I couldn't tell what type of bird it was from just the beak. As I was stopped looking up at the bird on top of the telephone pole, it hopped to the edge, leaned over and dropped off. I didn't immediately understand what was going on. All I saw was a bird free falling from the top of the telephone pole.
Just as the bird was about to hit the ground it spread its wings, made a sharp arc and landed gracefully on the ground about a foot away from me. The bird tipped his head, and looked up at me. Having sized me up, he hopped about 6 inches closer to me, pecked a bug from the ground, looked back up at me, and was off.
I don't know what, if anything, that encounter meant, but I was glad that I wasn't distracted by other things in my life, and I had the opportunity to share a little time with that bird.
