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 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, empty chimneys. When these buzzards lost their chimney when an old tenement house a mile or so up the road fell down. They set their sights on the old barn that stands behind our 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 for buzzards to roost and keep an eye on things. Like me. In the backyard. In 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 on the roof and stare . They’d beat their wings and lift away, only to come back, sit a moment, and plunge through the hole.
Our dogs mostly ignored the birds, even the rustling coming from inside the barn. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had to look.
It was grungy Inside the barn, just a storage place for extra boards and round, black drums, a utility trailer and a few metal pipes. The wind had broken the roof and more winds bent it back. The owner and I tiptoed through the leftovers and made our way to the scuttling noises that came from the extra wall of plywood propped on its side, nails dangerously exposed. He tilted the plywood forward. I startled! A gangly buzzard baby scurried away to hide. It’s downy, stale-yellow feathers showed splotches of black, as if it were trying to grow into a color.
I snapped a quick picture and we backed away. The dogs never bothered the baby or the buzzards, so they come back every year. Buzzards are like that.