Hawk Induced Silence

This morning it was very quiet in the woods outside my office, probably because a beautiful adult female Sharp-shinned Hawk was on patrol, cruising up and down the tree line and over the fields. On most mornings lately, I've been seeing over 20 species of birds. This morning, only a dozen or so were out, and the woods were almost completely silent--only a couple of Golden-crowned Kinglets were calling and one Winter Wren was singing deep in a tangled thicket.