The View from the Porch

So I go out on my back porch while eating a sandwich--it's a sunny 50 degrees at noon, how could you not--to check for flickers. They come every spring and I want to write about them and the ants. No flickers. Just robins, grackles, starlings, house finches, the usual citified birds. But then I cast about a little more and notice the woodpecker in the pagoda dogwood, the nuthatch creeping down the maple trunk, the mourning dove down among the fallen leaves and-- O glory!--up in the air is a red-tailed hawk circling high, white wing feathers flashing, tail spread out, fine as anything.