A white tailed kite sliced through the blue sky with precision and grace. I gaped in wonder. This creature moved like a bird of prey but resembled a seagull, white with striking black markings on the underside of its wings. It caused me to look, then look harder. I had never seen a kite before. Or to be exact, never before the previous evening. Sitting in a camping chair in the driveway near dusk, drinking wine out of a hot cup in a circle of neighbors, someone pointed it out to me, “That hawk’s caught a rat or something.”
We all looked, and everyone agreed that it had caught something. There was more attention on what it had caught than on what it was. I was slightly tipsy and trying hard not to try hard at anything. I watched the bird of prey pass over the rooftops and vanish from our sight. Unlike my companions, I could not focus on the thing grasped in its talons. I was curiously fixated on its legs, the shape of them, the color, and some nagging sense of discord.
It required the second, sober sighting the next day for things to click into place. Of course. This bird was white and looked entirely unlike the red-tailed hawks more commonly seen here. This was either the same bird or the same type of bird we had spied from the driveway the night before. The timing, too, was an indicator; kites hunt at dusk. After the first sighting that evening, as the light faded, we watched another white raptor fly over our heads and presumed it was an owl. Now I wonder if it was another kite or even the very same kite making another pass. We could not recognize this creature for what it was because we did not expect it.