By ERIC A. HOWALD
Of the Keizertimes

When a red-tailed hawk took to sitting outside the Keizer home of Renee Prince and peering in through the windows, the family enjoyed its company but thought nothing of it.

When it happened again the following year, they were pleasantly surprised.

By year three, the hawk was given a name, Tennerin, and Prince has had an ongoing friendship with the feathered visitor ever since.

"My only worry is that when the right person hears the name, they'll trace its origins and I'll find out it means ‘friend of an idiot,'" said Prince.

Prince doesn't even know whether Tennerin is male or female, but her affection for the raptor is palpable.

Outside her home, she calls out his name. Three minutes later Tennerin swoops in from behind and she smiles a mile, waves and says, "Hi, baby bird."

Prince and Tennerin first connected in the third year of his visits. She spotted him along the bank of the Willamette trying to wrest a store-bought chicken from its wrappings.

When she spotted him, she shooed him off, worried that the chicken was spoiled or possibly poisoned.

"He reluctantly went back to his perch in a cottonwood tree and began chirping at me and staring," said Prince.

She apologized for her rudeness and promised a piece of leftover steak to make up for the loss of a sizable meal.

It's been eight years since Tennerin first appeared near Prince's home, and the pair have what can only be described as a friendship.

He comes at her call, she'll play music for him, she provides snack-sized pieces of raw meat, and he gives her every reason in the world to look forward to winter.

Tennerin arrives each year like clockwork between Oct. 25 and 28 and, to the best of Prince's knowledge, departs for central Washington around the first day of spring in March.

As their time wanes its easy to hear the melancholy in Prince's voice, but it also brings back memories of his special good-bye last March.

"A few days before March 21, he flew by my bedroom window and we locked eyes and I came outside. He kind of circled above my head and I talked to him. That's when I realized he was leaving," she said.

Then two other hawks swooped in and the trio made their way to the north.

"It just felt so great, I was too happy to be sad," she said.

When he returned last October, he flew in "crazy loop-the-loops" over Prince's head.

When Tennerin can't be found on the Keizer side of the River, Prince drives to the Salem side, then Tennerin usually finds her.

"I think he recognizes my truck," she said.

Prince marvels at the raptor's intelligence. She has a background in cognitive psychology and had hoped to study dolphin communication. She spends a great deal of their time together trying to get inside his head.

Prince can stand a few feet away when Tennerin feeds.

She is conscious of those who would say what she is doing is wrong, but she's thought it through.

"Tennerin has always kept hunting on his own, landing in his tree with a snake in his claws or, once, a fish he grabbed out of a heron's beak," she said.

When he leaves again in the next few days, Prince will be sad but she's also aware of her incredible luck.

"It's so wonderful. He's a gift and I'm lucky to have had this odd chance," she said.