December 31

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End-of-year visitor.  Unknown variety of hawk.  I presume, from the speckles, that it's a juvenile.

In this shot it's looking right at us, from a tree across the street.

Here it's looking to the left.  We can almost make out its beak and eye....

I didn't know this at the time I took this pic, but I learned in early January that current best thinking is that some wolves domesticated themselves, by choosing to live near humans (so they could take advantage of a new food source -- large amounts of human garbage which resulted from humans sitting still because they had recently decided to invest heavily in agriculture).

The wolves that chose to live near humans became tamer and tamer over time.  This is domestication.

The Brian Hare, who taught Dog Emotion and Cognition, contends that we are seeing the biggest domestication event ever, now, as animals who used to be more "wild" now are more and more comfortable living close by humans.

I grew up in the 1960s, in a neighborhood about a mile from this house.  I never saw crows, or hawks, or red squirrels when I was growing up.  Now they are common in my neighborhood.  It's true the trees are bigger now (better habitat for those creatures?), but having heard about the Domestication Event, I wonder if these animals aren't choosing to live nearer to humans than their ancestors did, and if those choices are leading them down a domestication pathway..................

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