Birds, Back Yard, Black Friday

Many birds came to my back yard after the heavy morning rain. They were quite noisy, chirping all the time. Here are some of the birds I saw:

A blue jay.

Starlings. Quite gregarious.

A starling.

A robin.

Then all the birds left as suddenly as they came. The back yard turned quiet again, until something strange caught my eye, and I started taking pictures non-stop:
This bird landed in the garden, with its wings spread out, looking quite suspicious. I wonder what he was doing, what he was up to. What I saw and heard next would shock me for a whole afternoon.
It turned out that this bird was a sharp-shinned hawk, and it caught a starling. Since they arrived in the garden, the hawk had been plucking feathers out of the poor starling, which cried every time a feather was plucked. (I'm ignorant about birds. This was identified by our resident bird expert A. Before this, I didn't even know a hawk could look like so innocent and small.)

I thought about weather I should save the poor starling from this cruelty, but then I decided I'd better let Nature run its course. It had been a quite difficult experience, witnessing the killing with my own eyes. I hid safely in my study, while the unfortunate starling was being torn apart little by little. At some point, I coughed, hoping my existence would scare the hawk so he would leave the starling alone. Being a predator, he didn't even care. He knew I was watching, and he looked directly into my lens:

In this picture he looks like a hawk.


Minutes later, he took off, with the starling in tow，只留下一地鸟毛。