Park Clean-Up: Our Way and the Hawk's Way

Thursday we went to Nature Class. It was a beautiful day. We went to look at the old wine cellars in the park and then we walked over to the south beach to do a little pre-Earth Day clean up.

Here you can see Chase helping pile some of the trash they picked up along the Hudson shore.



It was nice to have my husband on vacation. He doesn't usually get to join us on these homeschooling outings. And he made the find of the day--a small glass flask from the 1800's with the stopper still on it! We gave it to the park ranger so the resident archeologists could look at it.

The children found some really nice river glass. I started feeling jealous because all I found was, well, trash. I was also taking a lot of photos.



Here is Sierra. Take a close look at her jacket pockets. They are drooping down from the weight of all the rocks and river glass she collected.



When we returned to the Nature Center after clean up on the beach, we were treated to a close up view of this red tailed hawk.



Isn't it* beautiful? Yes, that's a bird feeder it's sitting on. But songbirds weren't on the menu for this guy. When we took our pictures off the camera, we realized it had caught a rat! If you want to see the two shots of the hawk chowing down on the rat, look here and here. They are a bit graphic, so I didn't want to post them on the blog. Consider yourself warned. We were amazed at how close it let us get after it caught its prey and moved to a tree. We stayed until it flew down the hill to do some more hunting. Some of our homeschooling friends let us know that it had caught two more rodents. I guess it was hungry!

What a great way to end our day at the park!

*I'm using "it" because I really couldn't tell if it was male or female. If anyone can tell from these shots, let me know!