March 13, 2023 | Read Online

Bird of prey.

She looks like she's draped in a light brunette cloak that envelopes all of her.

Cole Schafer
March 13, 2023

The queen of my neighborhood is not a woman but a Red-tailed Hawk.

She's a mammoth of a bird; so big I first mistook her for an eagle. Lethally quiet, she patrols the skies overlooking Cleveland Park like a B-21 Stealth Bomber, nosediving only when her vision––8x the sharpness of a humans––spies movement in the grass beneath her.

Natural scientists say the binoculars on these winged assassins can pick up a field mouse taking a shit in a patch of crab grass while hauling ass at 40 mph through the air.

For most of the day she's a beautiful blur, save for the rare moments she perches on an outstretched limb or the top of a telephone pole outside my writing window.

Sitting still, she looks like she's draped in a light brunette cloak that envelopes all of her, save for a neat bouquet of brick-colored tail-feathers. It's not until she straightens out her wings that she unveils a peppered white underbelly like the shedding bark of an American Sycamore.

A few days back, I witnessed her taking rest on an electrical line, remaining still despite the incoming gusts of wind that caused the wire to gently sway. She reminded me of a sentry guarding her queen's sleeping quarters. Suddenly, as luck would have it, about twenty feet beneath her, she spied movement on the ground that I was blind too.

Like a drawn arrow begging to taste blood, she dropped from her look-out straight to the ground with just a quarter beat of her wings to maintain velocity without breaking her hollow bones.

Once in the grass, she repeatedly stomped out something wriggling beneath her and after what felt like a minute or so, she lurched back up to the electrical line, where she devoured her kill: a lifeless garter snake, dangling from a fist of clutched daggers.

Several months back, I picked a book by naturalist and writer Sy Montgomery called The Hawk's Way: Encounters with Fierce Beauty. In it, she writes about Falconry, an ancient practice––some historians believe has been around since 6,000 BC––where hunters catch, "tame" and train a bird of prey to hunt wild game.

Ever since reading the book, I catch myself looking up more.

I wonder, at times, if we are not drawn to the animals whose existences we envy. Perhaps, the Red-tailed Hawk is this for me.

They are free but disciplined.

They can go anywhere they damn well please. But, they choose to stick within a 2 mile radius, staking out their territory and marking it off with a violent, blood-curdling cry that Montgomery describes as, "...a scream that feels as if, with the help of a tiny spark, it could ignite a fireball and consume me, the crowd, the entire mountain."

They can truly see.

For all animals––ourselves included––the eyes are the only part of the brain that exists outside the skull. Being that each of a Red-tailed Hawk's eyes is the same size as its brain, it eyes are its brain. It doesn't think. It sees. Then, upon seeing, its instincts override its thinking––thousands upon thousands of years of lethal automation kicks in––and it does what it was made to do: hunt. "Thinking can get in the way of living," writes Montgomery, "Too often we see through our brains, not through our eyes."

They are good mates and fearless lovers.

They're monogamous and they mate for life (but they still manage to live independent lives) seeking out their former partners each year after being separated over winter. To impress their mates, males will climb to 1,000 feet in the air before dive-bombing towards the ground to show off their aerial skills. They'll then bump or tap or brush by their mates and if the females are impressed, they'll begin to tackle one another in mid-air, interlocking talons and falling towards the Earth, letting go at the last second, moments before they collide with the ground. They will then fly off and fuck in a nearby tree.

They are lifelong learners.

When hunting, a Red-tailed Hawk will never make the same mistake twice. Because of this, a three year old hawk is a much more dangerous hunter than a two year old hawk. They become wiser with age. In Robert D. Richardson's biography on Ralph Waldo Emerson, he likens the great thinker's reading habits to that of a hawks, "He read like a hawk sliding on the wind over a marsh, alert for what he could use. He read to nourish and to stimulate his own thought..."

The qualities in animals we admire are the qualities in ourselves we seek to embody. They're mirrors into ourselves and, at the same time, distant mirages brimming with the possibilities of what we could be.

And, it said that placing a hood over a bird of prey's eyes is like extinguishing a flame.

This is how I feel, when I am not writing.

By Cole Schafer.

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