Ignoring Sunday football, I was hunkered down at my computer, email in one window, researching Amazon on another, trying to figure why Clovis Assembly Member Mike Villines had handed Gov. Schwarzenegger a book titled, "The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes will Doom the Economy -- If We let It Happen."

Suddenly, shrieking in the backyard. My wife responded first, then said I needed to get back there -- gingerly.

There, on a patio table, a hawk, looking imperiously at us. The shrieking had come from the cage of two cockatiels we'd kept on the covered patio, shielded from most weather and low-hanging enough to keep away most everything except the odd paper wasp. Or so we thought.

Before I opened the door, I wondered what was handy to make the hawk skedaddle. It occurred to me I'd not been in my own backyard for a week or more. Flowers, trees, fallen leaves -- more importantly, the whereabouts of a rake or a broom -- I had no clue.

A new mental checklist formed -- not Web queries on the federal deficit or the status of regs that might impact hospitals or who the Yankees were trying to sign. What's in my own backyard? How do you fight a hawk? Who would believe a street kid from Brooklyn who would say, later, that a hawk had latched onto a cage, reached in and killed one of his cockatiels?

Bottom line: I found a broom and a rake. Lazily, the hawk loped over to a fence, later a Celtic cross in the garden, the barbecue -- thoroughly enjoying the cascade of hose water that I fruitless directed its way. I rescued the survivor and its cage. My wife took photos. And the Cooper's hawk hung around the yard all day. I knew the coast was clear when the sparrows and mourning doves returned -- I'd never noticed they'd been absent for days.

Lots of lessons learned. Turn off the dang PC. Put the smartphone on mute. Rake a few leaves. Hammer a few golf balls in the fog of an early Saturday morning. Relish the small world as you puzzle the big.