ALEXANDRIA, Va. — On Sunday, I was going to take photographs of my dirty car when I noticed a hawk several yards in front of me attacking a squirrel. The two went at it for about three minutes before the hawk pinned the squirrel down and suffocated it.

My brother, who arrived in the parking lot not long after I did, thinks it was a red tail hawk, a.k.a. chicken hawk.

The hawk wound up dragging the squirrel around for a while. I got bored and went out to complete the original task. Later, when I was in the parking lot again, the squirrel was in the grass, but the hawk had left.

That was easily the closest I had ever gotten to a big raptor. It isn’t the only wild life around our complex either — we’ve seen a doe and her fawn several times between Van Dorn Street and I-395.

[flickr : Hawk kills squirrel set/slideshow]