Blood On The Snow

I heard the calls, unusual for this neighborhood, from the big maple out front.  She was a female redtail hawk, enjoying the sunset from her high roost.  I had seen her a few days ago carrying away another bird to be eaten, chased by the distressed mate.  Bird-on-bird violence, distressing indeed.  I don't have the optics for good pics at a distance so I pulled this set from my archives.

Only minutes before, a live pidgeon was wrapped around this kernel of corn.  A customer at our former business, The Cup & Saucer Cafe, had been sitting out on the side deck for a smoke and witnessed the whole thing.  He said the hawk hit the pidgeon like a living hammer.  Once he had his dinner on the ground he hunkered down and held it with his talon and shielded it with his wings while he ate it, like a guy in prison shields his cafeteria tray from the other prisoners.  The hawk was completely aware of his audience but not at all intimidated - he held his ground and finished his meal.

And finish he did, leaving only feathers and corn.  Not much use for corn, to a hawk.

I raised a baby hawk when I was a kid, some three decades ago.  It had fallen from its nest in the huge hickory tree in front of Mom & Dad's.  I kept my distance all day as the parents swooped and squawked and screeched.  I gave them every chance to get their baby back but they couldn't do it.  At the end of the day I couldn't just let some cat get it, so I picked it up from the yard and put it in a nest I had made for it in some old parakeet cage I had borrowed from Nannie and I kept it in my room.  Even a baby hawk has that fierce eye, and we just sat and looked at each other a lot.  I named him Falcon Eddie after a character on a TV miniseries that aired back then.

I fed him raw hamburger, and as days went by he got somewhat comfortable with me and would perch on my finger.  I carried him around and let him look at the world with his fierce little eyes.  Eventually he started trying out his wings so I had to put a piece of soft yarn on his leg as a leash.  As his wings grew stronger I lengthened the leash to give him a fair chance to practice.  Once, I made the mistake of letting him practice a bit too close to the hawthorne tree in the back yard and he decided to perch in the top of it instead of on my finger.  I was always a tree-climber, but the climb to the top of that thorny tree while untangling the snagging yarn leash, and winding it up without yanking or otherwise upsetting my little bird friend - well, it wasn't something I wanted to repeat.  He was ready.

Next day, I went to a pet shop and bought two white mice.  They came in a carton like Chinese food!  Back home, Falcon Eddie was perched in his cage, waiting for his usual raw hamburger.  Knowing that hawks hunt visually, I dangled the first mouse by the tail and swung it before his fierce gaze.  His eyes could have faced down Genghis Khan or Geronimo that night as the squirming mouse drew his total focus.  I opened the cage door and set the mouse down.  Eddie was on it instantly!  His little talon gripped the mouse by the neck and he tore into it with his little hooked beak.  I was transfixed by his total hawk-ness.

That night in my room, a young man on his mattress, a hawk in his cage, and a mouse in a carton.  I'm not sure if any of us slept.  When day came I talked with Falcon Eddie for the last time, looking into that fierce hawk eye that I had come to love so well.  I told him that it was time for him to fly off and be a hawk and eat mice, not live with humans and eat hamburger.  I told him I had one more mouse for him before he left because it might take some time to figure out how to find them, and I didn't want him to be too hungry.  I took him out on the front porch and gave him that second doomed mouse.  Falcon Eddie told he that he understood perfectly.  When he had finished eating I picked him up in my hands, carried him across the road to the big pasture that slopes down to the farm pond and the woods beyond, and tossed him into the air.  He flew away.  I saw him a few times later, larger.  I'm sure he did OK.