Grass marmot grass marmot grass marmot grass marmot grass

Hi Toe,
This morning I took the car in for one of it's big milestone services. It is a beautiful morning, so I rode my bike back home along a bike trail near the river (it's really just a creek, but it is called a river here). As I got past the water treatment plant, I could see across the stream a brown and white hawk standing on an embankment about 6 feet from a fat marmot. There seemed to be no interaction happening between the two creatures, but I wondered: Had the hawk descended hoping to kill the marmot and realized at the last minute that it was too big? The marmot seemed oblivious to the hawk's presence--it just lazily nibbled on the grass on the upper banks of the river. It seemed confident that it was too big a meal for the hawk.

I stopped my bike to watch the scene. The hawk watched me, but the marmot kept grazing. I stood for a minute, and then the hawk took off, flapping across the river toward the water treatment plant. It landed on the plant fence, which has several rows of barbed wire on top angled toward the interior of the plant. I worried that if I remained I might startle the hawk into the barbed wire, so I continued on my way home.

Ten yards further on, I startled a pair of blue herons, which took off back toward the hawk and the marmot. It was like an episode of Wild Kingdom.
E-word