Be A Hawk

I was riding in a car with my dad on the last leg of a father/son roadtrip today and we both noticed a magnificent Hawk flying nearby. It reminded me a something I’d once heard about Hawks being a great metaphor for good businesspeople (especially in the emerging ‘portfolio career’ model I see coming – I’ll blog that later).

The ability to manuever from the big picture to the details and back with finesse, grace and limitless skill is quite handy. That’s exactly what the Hawk can do. Flying several thousand feet high (exact number?), swooping down to pick up a moving animal the size of a human hand (field mouse) and then back up. Talk about seriously cool.

So If I call you a Hawk, It’s a good thing. If your not out there being a hawk, go be a hawk!

This 10 minute car ride conversation and subsequent Blog Post inspired some Wiki-walking. From Wikipedia’s entry on Hawks:

“In February 2005 the Canadian scientist Dr Louis Lefebvre announced a method of measuring avian IQ in terms of their innovation in feeding habits. Hawks were named among the most intelligent birds based on this scale.

Hawks are believed to have vision as good as 20/2, about eight times more acute than humans with good eyesight. This is because of many photoreceptors in the retina (Up to 1,000,000 per square mm, against 200,000 for humans), a very high number of nerves connecting the receptors to the brain, a second set of eye muscles not found in other animals, and an indented fovea which magnifies the central part of the visual field.”

Those are some pretty sweet birds.