Stalemate

Jeanne Blum Lesinski

The blue jays had warned the other birds at the feeder but weren’t fast enough to escape too. Perched between the slender barren apple branches, as if inside a self-made jail, they waited, eyed the gunmetal gray cooper’s hawk on a main branch. A hairy woodpecker, hidden on the trunk back, inched its way downward out of danger, while from underneath a snow-laden spruce mere feet away, an audience of red-eyed juncos huddled, hungry for this drama’s finale.

the flight equation

time, temperature, wind, want

only nature knows