30 November 2015. Queen Elizabeth Way, Mississauga, ON. It’s been a while since I needed birding to get away from a tedious day of work; indeed it’s been a while since I held a steady job at all. But a friend offered me casual work, one day per week, delivering product to various customers in and around the city of Toronto. I’ve been doing it for three months now; I manage.
Mid-morning today, perched high above ordinary car traffic at the wheel of the largest truck my ‘G’ license allows me to drive, I was plodding along with the flow of city-bound traffic. I noted several Red-tailed Hawks: two were soaring in circles over a major interchange and others had moved into position as sentinels along our highways. In a way, they are the truck traffic among birds, heavy, deliberate and conspicuous; you wouldn’t want to be hit by a Red-tailed Hawk.
Thirty minutes into my journey and moving steadily with the flow of traffic, I glanced to my right at an uphill on-ramp delivering new traffic into our stream. A white something-or-other car was closing in about to join us, and then, going the other way a falcon flicked past on easy wing-beats. Just a fleeting glimpse, but enough to know it was a Merlin: too small, too brown and too much of a sprinter to be a Peregrine Falcon; too direct and purposeful to be an American Kestrel. This little sports car of a bird defying the rules of traffic added a defiant “See ya!” zip to the ordered progression of highway manners. Merlins, by the way, make flying look easy.
