The other day I thought I heard seagulls in my neighborhood. There are a lot of seagulls in Michigan. They were a fixture of my childhood growing up as I did just a few miles from the Saginaw Bay, which you’ll find nestled between the thumb and pointer finger of The Mitten. But I don’t see them all that much in Lansing, which is just about as far away from the Great Lakes as you can get (*sigh*). So I did think it was a bit odd to hear them while out in my yard.

During the glorious experience that was Saturday, my neighbor pointed out the true source of the sound: a pair of red-tailed hawks setting up housekeeping across the street. Besides that classic long scream sound, these hawks also make shorter calls that can sound a bit seagullish. So we can look forward to watching these beautiful birds soaring around the neighborhood all summer.

But in case you don’t have any raptors nesting in your neighborhood, or if you want to get a more intimate look at raptor behavior, or even if you just want a nice soundscape in the background while you’re working, you should check out the Eagle Cam set up in Benzie County on the shores of the Platte River where as I type this a bald eagle is sitting on her eggs 100 feet off the ground. It’s a live feed and promises to be an interesting one once the eaglets are hatched and mom and dad get busy raising them.