Weekend Airshow

In Taiwan, Hakka people’s tomb sweeping season starts right after the Lantern Festival (January 15 on the Lunar Calendar, which is March 4 this year).  So we returned to my hometown, 卓蘭, late last night for the important occasion.  This morning, as my extended family was performing the ritual, an airshow quietly started overhead…

First I spotted a hawk circling in the lower sky.  While everybody were watching its performance, a second hawk joined it and both began to fly towards our direction, almost directly over us.

Then the duo began to play and circled for a few minutes.

To everyone’s amazement, as the duo broke up the circling pattern, a third one joined them.  But they were some distances away at the time and I was not able to get a good shot with my wife’s small Sony camera.  So I’ll leave it to your imagination.

We saw a lone hawk fly at last year’s tomb sweeping.  But this is my first time to see more than one hawk fly at the same time.  Is it because our environment is getting cleaner?  If you are interested, I also got the duo performance in motion: click to download (7 MB).

If you were expecting to see aircraft fly here, I am sorry.  If you are into bird spotting, could you tell me what kind of hawk I saw?