Every resort has a pool guy, a towel guy, and apparently, if you are lucky, a guy whose entire job is a hawk.
This is a Harris’s hawk, and the leather glove and leg tag are the giveaway that this is not a wild encounter, it is a job. Beachfront resorts along the Mexican Caribbean coast deal with the same problem hotels everywhere near water deal with: gulls, grackles, and pigeons treating every open air breakfast as an all you can eat buffet. Rather than fight that with netting or noise, a lot of properties hire falconers instead. The hawk does not need to catch anything. It just needs to circle the property a few times a day so every other bird in the area remembers there is a predator with rank here, and clears out on its own.
It is a strange kind of quiet authority to watch in person. No chasing, no drama, just one bird on a glove and an entire flock of pigeons that suddenly finds somewhere else to be. I have written about a different kind of animal encounter closer to home in Mexico, with friends, but this one, just me and a very unimpressed bird of prey, needed its own post.
