As I was walking to an appointment at another law office today, I came across an interesting crime scene.

Walking east along Union Street, between 3rd and 2nd Avenue, I spotted what had to be a horrifying scene. In the looming shadow of the now-Regents Bank Building, there were two piles of feathers.

Being a regular downtown denizen, the occasional unlucky pigeon is not an uncommon sight. This however, had a different flair to it. The nearer batch of feathers was larger than the average pigeon, and as I approached, appeared to have a dusty brown hue. Just then a stiff breeze swirled between the buildings, lifting the still plumage, and providing me with a better look - this was no pigeon.

As I passed closer, I was surprised to see a much larger bird, and upon closer examination, concluded that what I was looking at was a hawk. I suppose there are hawks downtown - I just haven’t seen one. Keeping apace, about ten feet closer to the intersection of Second Avenue, there was the much smaller yet much more familiar unmistakable gray feathering of the common pigeon.

My first close experience with a hawk was about four years ago. I was sitting at my desk in my upstairs home office, and happened to glance out the window. There on a branch maybe three feet from me, and on it was a large mocking bird. Cool, I thought. I like mocking birds. As far as song birds go, they’re pretty tough. No one messes with a mocking bird.

Then in an instant, there was a flash of darkness, and a poofy cloud of grayish white feathers lie suspended in the air, hovering where the mocking bird used to be. Amazed at the turn of events, I got up from my chair, looked, and down on the front yard I witnessed the culprit. A hawk had gotten the mocking bird, and had him pinned to the lawn. Ouch.

I could only deduce what had happened this time. My theory is that the pigeon got spotted. Lucky on the front end even to realize he was in the hawk’s sights, he fled. The hawk zeroed in on his prey, and in his focus, lost track of everything else around him. With the hawk gaining every aerial foot, both predator and prey pumping full of adrenaline, the pigeon took evasive maneuvers, twisting into the street, as fate and necessity would have it, without looking both ways (sadly, Union is a one way street at this point - one direction would have sufficed). The hawk, myopically focused on the ever nearing pigeon, stayed precisely on course and made the same error.

There may be two piles of feathers, but there can be only one story.