Anyway, there was this lodge up there with a redtail hawk in a pen outside, and you could walk right up to it and take pictures of it. I wondered briefly how the redtail hawk felt having people standing outside the rail looking at it, but then I remembered that it's a lot like how people up there look at people like me. Without the fence between us, I mean.

 

I thought it would be funny to stand outside the pen and say "Hello! Hello! Hello!" like I was trying to get it to talk to me, even though on some level I knew that big birds like that don't talk. I don't know why, though, because it seems like a hawk (even one in a cage) would have to be way way smarter than a parrot or a mockingbird, even just to feed itself. They have to catch and eat mice and other things that fly, they have to build nests way up in the air; there's just no way that a parrot is smarter than they are.

 

But then I think, maybe they don't talk because they're too cool, like Fonzie on the first two seasons of Happy Days used to just ride around on his bike and not talk to anyone. Maybe it's smarter not to say anything than just to repeat what people tell you. But then I notice that every time I step up to the cage, the hawk turns away from me, so it might be to his benefit to at least learn how to say "Get the *&%$! away from me!"

 

I wonder why hawks and eagles don't talk, and I'm also starting to wonder why monkeys don't talk. If you can teach a parrot to talk and you can teach a gorilla sign language, I wonder why you can't teach apes and monkeys how to talk at least enough to say "Ape like peanuts" or something.

 

But no. Why do we even have to teach gorillas sign language, and what could they possibly have to tell us that we don't already know. I guess they could tell us what it's like to pick bugs off each other and eat them, but it seems like a lot of effort and very little payoff.