Indomitable
Red tailed-hawks, being seen, and belonging
One Sunday afternoon this Spring, I decided I was so irritated with myself and my attitude that I wanted a divorce. I couldn’t figure out how one does that exactly, and surely the paperwork is onerous and confusing. So, instead, I thought perhaps I could do something to reframe the endless stream of garbage in my head.
I needed something to focus on that had nothing to do with work, relationships, chores, or fears for the future. So, I picked up a blank notebook and settled under a pine in my front yard across from the bird feeders. I vowed that for 20 minutes I would sit perfectly still and concentrate on every detail of the visiting birds. I’m terrible at field journaling and can’t draw without a reference photo. So, I thought I would just jot down the species I saw and try to clear my mind.
It didn’t really work. I was uncomfortable. And I was bored. Even the birds at my feeder looked disinterested. It was just the regulars cracking seeds without gusto and even the fueling migrants seemed distracted by a better destination. I was about to admit defeat when I looked up and spotted the tiny silhouette of a red-tailed hawk in between the branches of the Aleppo pine.
That in itself wasn’t unusual. I am very familiar with the red-tailed hawks I’ve shared my neighborhood with for 22 years and I see them soaring in thermals frequently. What caught my attention was that it had pulled in its wings and was rapidly dropping in my direction. It was a perfect straight-line stoop from at least 500 feet that ended with the flaring of its wings and a graceful landing on a bough 50 feet directly above me.
The birds at my feeder scattered and I groaned, lifting my chin to grumble, “Come on, man!” and then I realized the hawk was bent over and staring directly down at me. “Um, hi?” I said and we both settled again, me waiting for the hawk to leave and she, the female of the pair I’ve always called the Red Queen, waiting for whatever she was waiting for … for me to do something maybe? As we continued to give each other furtive glances, I finally admitted to myself that it wasn’t happenstance. She had to come to see me.
While I waited for her departure, I found myself thinking about the places I hunt with my own hawks the most frequently and how I eventually get to a place where I both see and am seen. The quail recognize me, the rabbits recognize me, and I recognize the wild raptors and coyotes that could be a problem for my bird. We all see each other as part of the landscape eventually, recognizing the sounds and movement of one another’s arrivals and departures. It’s what makes me feel like I’m a part of place. In fact, years ago, one summer when I was hunting California quail with a young Cooper’s hawk named Elsa, I had a moment when I realized our hunting ground knew me better than I knew it.
We hunted every evening in the chaparral a mile up the road from my house and it didn’t take long for the quail to recognize my truck, but that didn’t surprise me. Quail are smart because everything wants to eat them. In fact, Elsa caught very few of them and it didn’t matter much to me because my evening hike was always a delightfully exhausting adventure. I beat brush and scaled hills, and Elsa sprinted after the birds that flushed in front of us. Then one day, after tracking a covey of quail I had already flushed twice, Elsa became very intrigued by something behind us. I wanted to move the quail again thinking this was her best chance, but I needed her attention. So, I turned to follow her gaze.
In the brush at a very respectful distance, a bobcat was waiting. My heart leapt for a moment, thinking more of my tiny hawk than myself, but the cat was relaxed. It was waiting for something. And it was a good distance away, but I thought I saw a slow blink. So, I turned back to Elsa, whose attention was again fully on the quail skittering in the lemonade berry, and I jumped in to flush them.
Elsa’s was halfhearted about her chase which was disappointing. So, I turned again to look at the bobcat. She was no longer stationary. She was leaping after the quail that had flushed behind us. I grinned, my disappointment dissolved, and tracked a portion of the fleeing flock of quail and tried again. For the last 20 minutes of light, we all hunted together, and I understood to my bones for the first time that I was a part of nature too. I knew this because I was seen, not just as a human, but as a component of how we can all survive.
After 15 minutes or so, I realized that there would no be songbirds at my feeder to add to my list or to watch as long as the Red Queen was there. So, I turned my face to the branch above me and decided to draw her. As I noted, I’m terrible at field drawings. I scratched at the paper, erased and tried again to start the shape of her body. I drew an eye, a wing, her head, grumbled, and then looked up to see why my sketch didn’t look quite right.
The Red Queen, with her acute eyesight, had tilted her head as if she was intrigued, her neck stretching past her feet to get a better view below. She didn’t look impressed. “If you’re going to criticize, go someplace else,” I mumbled, but she kept watching.
I’ve known the Red Queen for 22 years and perhaps she been watching me longer than I know. She was across the street and working on her nest with a mate when I my bought my house in Banning. And I know it’s been her all these years because red-tailed hawks have such variable plumage and I’ve compared all the old photos I took in the early years.
She is old for a red-tailed hawk, especially when you think about all the mistakes that can lead to their death. They could miss the head when they catch a rattlesnake, get hit by a car, land on the wrong pole and get electrocuted or lose their lives to a .22 while being tempted by a flock of backyard chickens. None of these things are fair and some just aren’t right, but they make for a short life when you’re a hawk.
The oldest recorded banded red-tailed was just over 30 years old when it died, but that’s rare if not unprecedented. I figure the Red Queen has to be at least 25, because she had the deep brown eyes of an older adult when I met her. She could quite possibly be older than that. I wonder what all she has seen. I found myself thinking how incredible it was that she not just noticed me, but that I was seen by her as well.
I know the Red Queen knows me because she made short work of my pigeons when I had a flying flock. In fact, she had no concerns about catching them right of front of me while I wailed, “NOOOOO. That one was my favorite.”
She also knows me because over the years I’ve saved a few of her young, either fallen from the nest or when they were fledglings. One year, I came home to find a baby red-tailed hawk squeezed into a parakeet cage on my porch. I’m not really sure who found it or how they decided I was right person to foist it on. There wasn’t a note. That was 15 years ago and I suppose I’ll never know, but I put the baby in an empty hawk house I had that summer. I fed it like I would feed my falconry birds and when it could fly, it had a view of its natal nest from the perch against its barred window. And when its siblings started flying, I let it loose and the Red Queen finished raising it with its brother and sister. I’ve always figured she thought I kidnapped her kid, but who really knows what a hawk thinks about what it sees. That’s kind of the beauty of it.
I was trying really hard to see her while I forced myself to be a field artist. And while I laughed at myself for making the Red Queen lopsided, I wondered if she had noticed how I’ve aged in past two decades. Is this part of the intrigue for her? Does she remember when I was 32, full of energy and youthful beauty? Can she see with her keen eyesight the fine wrinkles that spread from eyes and the corners of mouth from smiling. Does she see me and pause like I do when I see myself in the mirror, expecting a young woman? Is this fascinating to a hawk that never ages? Because birds, even if they did memorize what they see in mirror in their youth, simply never change until the end is near. She is as young as the day I met her, except that I know she’s not.
Over the years I came to expect three delightful dumb juvenile hawks in my yard every June. Here’s where I’ve saved her kids again. The fledgling that thought it was a good idea to get thoroughly soaked in the neighbor’s sprinklers and then run out into traffic, for example. Then eventually she only raised two a year and then only one. Then for the last five years none. Her mates have changed over the years and the male that’s with her now is young. (Good for you, Bro. You couldn’t have a better teacher in survival.) Yet, it’s been undeniable that we have faced the end of our reproductive years together. It’s done for me, but she keeps building nests, and I keep rooting her on.
As I drew, I found myself apologizing to her, not just for the crappy drawing but for the jerks who had cut down her nest the month before. The home where the tree is rooted was torn down to the frame and rebuilt over the spring. I was happy to see the house restored, but construction workers who lop off the boughs of old pines, especially ones with a nest after February, are disregarding everything I’ve come to adore about my street. My neighbors aren’t just the people I’ve come to love.
I cried, but I knew she and her mate might build a new nest in another pine. There was enough time. I know that things change, but the choice to change things for the sake of one person’s desire with no regard to unintended consequences was too hard for me. I could accept an arborist’s decision for the sake of the tree, but not ignorant butchers destroying the nest. This was especially true of a nest that I watched generations of young raptors take to the air for their first time.
I apologized to the Red Queen for all that humans do and for all that I cannot do enough to make it better. And I tried a little harder to see her, because I realized that I dreaded the day I would no longer see her again. And realized how little all the garbage in my head really mattered. It’s been a hard year, but it’s always a hard year for the Red Queen. The shrinking hunting grounds that taught her to use houses as blind to hunt grosbeaks, the droughts that taught her to hunt gophers in irrigated lawns, West Nile Disease, lost nests, there was always a way. She was indomitable.
She is indomitable. The Red Queen and her consort built a new nest. They chose a tree I can still see from my porch. It’s hard not to wonder if they chose the location because we want to see each other. That’s unlikely. It probably had the right structure, windbreak, and sunlight. I’ll never get to know exactly. What do know though, is that for the first time in five years she successfully fledged a chick.
I thought I heard a baby red-tailed hawk begging on my street last Saturday. Then I figured it wasn’t a thought, just a hope. Then on Sunday it was an undeniable call. I tracked it down by sound to find a young tiercel red-tailed hawk in a tree next door to my house. I got my camera out just in time to capture the Red Queen luring him one street over to hand off a gopher snake and to start teaching him what you need to know to survive.
The thing is, I think she taught me too. What she taught me was that it’s never over. Don’t get me wrong, I’m squarely in menopause. That story is done for me and I’m good with that, but it’s not the only good story left for me to tell.
Nature doesn’t quit and I’m a part of nature. I see nature and it sees me, and we are in this together, always. I don’t need a divorce from myself. I just need hope. I too, am indomitable.
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Nice. Really nice.