Chasing Buzzards

The dogs run through the field, barking at the sky…Alert! Alert! Five…then ten…fifteen buzzards circle overhead. As their circles narrow, I know. 
It’s time.

Buzzards usually return to the same nesting site every year to hatch their yearlings. They like quiet places, like abandoned barns and broken, deserted houses with tall chimneys. When the buzzards lost their chimney in an old tenement house a mile or so up the road, they set their sights on the old barn that stands behind the fence and overlooks our garden, in spite of any rowdy dog. The once-icon barn had grown weary and was ready to collapse, its tin roof curled back in several places. A perfect nest where buzzards can roost and keep an eye on things, like me. In the backyard. And my garden.

I watched them, too, their comings and goings as they plunged through the slit of tin and dropped to the ground. Or hop out of the hole to sit and stare on the roof. Several times a day they’d beat their wings and lift away, only to come back, sit a moment before plunging into their hole.

The dogs mostly ignored the birds, even the rustling coming from inside the barn. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to take a look.

Inside was grungy, with broken boards and round, black drums, and a few metal pipes. The roof was broken open and squeaked in the breeze and winds that bent it. I tiptoed through the traffic of leftovers and made my way to the muffled scuttling noises that came from behind a wall of plywood propped on its side, nails dangerously exposed. Tilting the plywood away, I startled as a gangly buzzard baby scurried away. It had downy, stale-yellow feathers with splotches of black, as if trying to grow into a color.

I snapped a quick picture with my iPhone and left.

The dogs never bothered them, so the buzzards come back every year. Buzzards are like that.