The Cooper’s hawk is a great teacher of bird language.
This is a very common hawk in North America that specializes in hunting songbirds.
When the Cooper’s is nearby, you’ll notice birds like the american robin, juncos, sparrows, jays & crows get very agitated & jittery.
They ditch into the bushes and give high-pitched “Dog whistle” type alarm calls.
A landscape normally filled with energetic bird songs & bustling activity, feeding & nesting will become suddenly stark silent and tense.
If you pay close attention, you can learn to spot the signs of predators like the Cooper’s hawk lurking in your own backyard.
Today on the Nature Wisdom Podcast, we’ll look at a superb example coming from my good friend Steve Leckman.
I’ve known Steve for a long time.
He runs a nature school in Montreal called Coyote Programs.
He’s a really great guy.
And one of the things I really like about Steve is that he is always so engaged with his own nature awareness practices.
He actually gets out there and he walks the talk, he goes tracking, he does his sense meditation, and he always has really cool stories to share because of that.
So recently he was telling me about something that happened at his sit spot, right in his own backyard.
And it was both a really cool bird language story with great lessons about the behaviour of robins and grey squirrels and Cooper’s hawks.
But it was also a really good example of how simple nature observation & sitting quietly outside, will lead to tremendous personal reflection & insight.
There’s a very subtle balance between being wrapped up in thinking and self-analysis, that is very much in contrast to actually being present with the world in a sensory way.
A lot of people just get completely lost in their emotions & their ideas and they end up missing almost everything that’s happening around them.
Steve gets this balance really really well.
And I’m excited for you to hear his story.
This is a great episode. We went really deep into bird language alarm dynamics and also the more internal personal reflection type inner tracking.
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