The other night as I climbed into my car after work, I spotted a
large bird crouched on the embankment ahead of me.
The other night as I climbed into my car after work, I spotted a large bird crouched on the embankment ahead of me.
I was parked facing a row of conifers atop a weedy incline that sloped between the parking lot and the freeway. I’d never seen a bird there before. Was this one a large jay?
As I looked at it in the diminishing light, it seemed too big to be a jay, and not blue enough. While I was watching, the bird jumped into the air and turned 180 degrees so it was now facing to my right instead of my left. For the brief moment it was in midair, I saw that it clutched something dark in its talons.
It really looked like a hawk. I’d seen red-tailed hawks perched on wires above Highway 25, but never any hawk this close.
It turned its head back and forth several times, perhaps made nervous by the noise I’d made getting into the car. I projected that having found its dinner, it wanted to be sure it could enjoy it without further disturbance.
I decided to watch it for a while. I sat very still, although I didn’t think the bird could see or hear me from where it was.
At first it appeared the prey was still alive. I saw movement at the bird’s feet every time it leaned down to take a bite. I imagined a mouse or a lizard praying for its agony to end, even knowing that mice and lizards don’t pray.
Then I realized that the movement I saw was dark feathers fluttering as the hawk got them out of the way. The hawk took bite after bite, quickly but methodically. Once, the bite still had feathers attached and the hawk, unable to spit them out, shook its head sharply to get the feathers off its beak.
I wanted to see better, so I turned on the parking lights. The hawk took no notice, so I turned on the headlights. I could see that the wings were gray, the breast, head and leg feathers white. It was about 15 inches long. I researched hawk species later and determined it might be a northern harrier, or maybe a sharp-shinned hawk.
I felt privileged to have been able to watch something that I have only seen on documentaries. And few documentaries capture the rightness of a predator feeding, the way my private hawk viewing did.
Documentaries focus on the drama of the chase, and often make the predator the villain and the prey the victim.
It is true that the life of the individual prey is sacrificed. But as part of its species, that is its destiny.
Without predators, its kind would overfill their habitat, and eventually begin to starve. Without predators, the weak and slow would reproduce and weaken the population.
We are in a time when nature seems to have lost its way. Antarctica is melting, the seas are rising, the cold gets colder and the hot gets hotter. Some species are disappearing and others are becoming pestilential infestations.
It was reassuring to see this hawk doing what it was born to do.
