The bird turned up in a photo posted to r/sanfrancisco this week, the kind of image that accumulates upvotes not because anything dramatic is happening but because the composition earns it: a large raptor, brick-red tail fanned slightly, perched above the Duboce Triangle rooflines and the distant smear of downtown. The photographer noted they were visiting the city. The hawk, presumably, was not.

Red-tailed hawks are not rare in San Francisco — they nest in Golden Gate Park, hunt the margins of Dolores, ride thermals above Twin Peaks — but Corona Heights has a particular quality that seems to suit them. The park is mostly exposed rock and scrub grass, a chunk of the old Vulcan Quarry that the city never fully tamed into lawn, and the elevation puts a hunting bird at exactly the right height to watch the open slope below for movement. Birders who frequent the park say they've clocked red-tails there across multiple seasons, sometimes the same individual returning to the same perch.

The park draws its own consistent crowd: dog people in the morning, kids on the climbing rocks by midday, photographers and hikers in the late light. The hawk, when it shows, tends to ignore all of them, which is most of the appeal.

Anyone walking up the trail from Roosevelt tomorrow and looking toward the summit rocks will find the same view that's always been there — chert, sky, the long drop toward the Castro — and may or may not find a hawk on it. That uncertainty is, more or less, the point.