One time when I was in a wooded preserve with Maya and the dog, we saw a large bird, one that looked like a bird of prey. We weren’t sure what kind of bird it was, but a little later on we met a woman in the preserve, who was also walking her dog, and after falling into conversation with her, she said that the bird we had seen was probably a buzzard.
Maya was very excited about having just seen a buzzard, which made me a little confused. “A buzzard?” I thought. For one, the bird we had seen sitting high in the treetops did not look like a buzzard; and two, even if it was a buzzard, why would you get excited about seeing it?
Eventually, I did some research and found out that the woman wasn’t referring to a turkey vulture, but rather a small hawk found widely in Europe, a “bussard.” She had just been pronouncing the “s’s” like “z’s.”
Then, yesterday, I was in the car with Martina, driving through the German state of Brandenburg. The state Brandenburg is very rural. In Brandenburg you see farmland and potato fields and wind turbines. As we were passing one house along the road, I saw that a big-horned buck and several doe were kept in a pen on the property.
At one point, I looked up and saw a bussard perched on the branch of a big pine tree that towered over the road.
“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s a bussard.” Martina was at the wheel and my observation didn’t even faze her.
“I know,” she said. “I told you it was country-like here.”
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