Visitor or Resident?

This is what awaited me as I drove into my driveway today.

It has a broken leg. I felt sorry for it, but since we are not licensed raptor rehabilitators, we couldn't do much for it besides call the wildlife people. That was an exercise in futility. Talk about a run around. It is illegal to kill or capture these birds, yet when you have one in need of help no one will take responsibility. The game and fish department says, call the sheriff, the sheriff says call the wild life people. I guess we should have called in an anonymous tip that Prairie House was harboring raptors...that would have brought out an army to arrest us, I'm sure. Then maybe someone would have taken care of the poor thing.

It made a few attempts to fly and couldn't get lift as he couldn't put any weight on the broken leg.

I went back to check on it about a half hour later and it had successfully obtained flying altitude and was gone. Much to the relief of all of our other birds...especially the Guineas who kept screaming, "Danger, predator. Danger, predator." most of the time the Hawk was here.