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One of these days when we visit NYC, we will have to make a stop to check out Pale Male’s house on 5^th Avenue. In case you have not heard of him, he is a red-tailed hawk who has lived in NYC for just about twenty years. That’s right, a red-tailed hawk thriving in the most urban of urban areas for twenty years—and he is not the only one. I was thinking about him yesterday as I listened to a Bird Note episode about his popularity with not only NYC birders, but New Yorkers in general. It was nice to hear this broadcast after I had been driving around a nearby lake earlier looking at all of the trash left by hunters and thinking, it can’t all be bad news, can it? Despite what we humans throw at them (sometimes, quite literally), wild birds just keep on keeping on. They find a way. I hope that we humans can learn to be better at self-reflection. I hope we can learn to stop and look up, stop and listen, and think about what truly matters. I hope that we can learn to make connections. We can learn that the chickens we eat matter just as much as the wild birds we watch. I hope that we can learn to look at our inconsistencies and truly reflect. We’re not perfect and we do not have to be perfect. We just have to stop and think, reflect, evolve. Imagine a collective reflection. Imagine the kind of change we could make.

© Chris Taylor