Post of shame

I don't even want to post this and find out how long it's been since the last one. I guess I'll just recount something odd that happened the other day to try to get back on my game. Never too late to be what you might have been, I suppose.

I was rushing to class the other day and vaguely registered the fact that a male robin was singing, sitting on the green (Green! When did that happen? How did that happen?!) lawn beside the sidewalk. As I walked by, I heard a flutter, and saw movement in the corner of my eye. I wasn't concerned, but as I took another step, the tussle was still going on. To be honest, I thought I might have to break up a robin fight... it's clear why they're all hanging around squawking their brains out in plain view, and I've seen some of the guys get pretty vicious with each other before. I was a little upset because I was already late for class, but I didn't really have time to even let that irritation register because I was turned around by then, staring at a hawk.

My eyes were expecting the robin, and so the hawk seemed gigantic. With a second to recover, I realized it was about the size of a duck... maybe a little bigger. He was staring at me just as intently as I was staring at him, although he appeared to be a little less baffled (presumably as he had the advantage of knowing I was there before he came down).

I know a little bit about raptors, having been fascinated by them the same way my brother was fascinated by airplanes in middle school, with the significant additions of a productive week spent at Raptor Camp, handing mostly-headless freeze-dried baby chicks to Coop and Sharpie, my assigned disabled hawks for the week, scraping the tiny brains and entrails off their astroturfed perch later. My first thought was that this one had the face of a peregrine, but I knew it was far too big right off. Instincts I got from playing some Audubon birdwatching game kicked in, thankfully. Squared, narrow, barred tail. I knew I'd be able to find it from that.

As I searched the bird for details, my eyes happened to dart down to the pitiful little scrunch of red beneath its talons that had been the robin. Curiously, I had no immediate sense of pity for it. The kinetic charisma of the hawk has displaced any empathy I had for its prey. It's not one peer murdering another; it's the inevitable result of the clash of the truly great with the small. Human metaphors are so nidering in the animal world-- our versions of greatness are piddling little things, political maneuvers and pointless little hats and gestures. Here was not the maddening injustice of one man scrabbling up to stomp on another-- here was what powerful men try and fail to imitate, a simple case of being born better. He (She?) stared at me for another few seconds, took a short hop of a flight a few feet left to get a better grip on the robin's body, and winged up over the Western Walk.

I say that I had no sense of pity for the robin-- I'm not sure how right that sounds. I was not, at all, apathetic. I was the only witness to the end of this life (and a right bad one, too, having only seen the moment of impact out of the corner of my eye), and I felt I should be telling the world. I opened and closed my phone a dozen times in a minute, beginning and then aborting various text messages, and phone calls. What was this need to proclaim? "Hawk Kills Robin!" "Sun Rises!" I've found myself telling the rather gruesome story to people who probably want nothing to do with it-- it just doesn't seem like something that should be kept silent. I looked up my hawk later, and found that it was a Cooper's after all (one of my top two guesses at the time -- very proud of myself). According the writeup I found, they kill other birds by squeezing them to death. The hawk probably was stopped on the ground like that because it needed some time to finish the job-- I dismissed the robin as a bundle of feathers while it was still fighting for breath. But it is true that I did not pity the robin. The robin got what it signed up for when it decided to be a robin.

Instead, the killing brought to mind my feebleminded, egotistical hawks, Coop and Sharpie, living between the red-shoulders and the red-tails until they died. Sharpie (a sharp-shinned hawk) used to flutter down from the perch and run what looked like suicide drills on his short little legs, end to end in the roomy cage, then flap awkwardly up to a perch to look at me with a cocky glare, beak open, head sideways, daring me to do something about it while Coop lazily squawked in the corner for him to shut up. Solo, the bald eagle two cages down who lost a wing to a power line, walking up his spiral staircase of perches one painstaking step at a time every morning so that he could better glare from the top of his gigantic habitat.

He fell one day, slipped off one of the steps of his staircase right onto his one good wing. He screamed. Bald eagles are not noble-sounding birds under the best of circumstances-- this one was in the panic of helplessness, and he was wailing, flailing with his talons at anything within reach and madly trying to flap the wing out from under him. We all stood and stared at the spectacle, just as helpless as he was to get him upright again, to give him two wings, to let him fly again, to give him back his crown. Camp counselors made the rounds as the director came out with her leather gloves-- "Give him some space. It'll only upset him more, he knows you're watching." Nothing to see here, move along, just a disturbed individual, he's under control. We averted our eyes.

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,

No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.

He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.

He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,

The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.

You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.

I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks"