Thursday, May 03, 2007

The Better Part of Valor

More birdy stuff!  Next time I’ll have Peter Gabriel write the score and I’ll get Matt Modine to play the lead!  Or not!  I’m just. that. birdy!  Enjoy!

I’ve long held hawks as personal totems of a sort.  I have no particular reason for my attraction to them but I’ve always taken their occasional appearance as a good omen.  We get the red-tails, red-shouldereds, and Swainson’s around here, and it really cheers me up to see them stretched out across the sky or perched on a traffic light or treetop snag.  They always look so regal and severe.  Even that one time I saw a couple of them doing it on the top of a telephone pole, their flailing and coupling, talons clutching, hoarsely screaming, inspired in me more awe and fear than prurient amusement.  So, basically, I’ve always thought that hawks were pretty cool.  And I guess that’s as far as I took it.

I mention all this as a possible reason why I seem to have suppressed awareness of some apparently typical accipitrine behavior: being attacked by all the other birds.  It really doesn’t seem true to their form, does it?  In a one-on-one between a hawk and most any other bird, I’d put my money on the hawk.  So when I sometimes saw a hawk on the run, tail feathers being yanked by a rogue raven or crow, I’d think, damn, that is one tough raven….

I’ve seen that scene repeated many times over, and each time I’d think of it as a special case, a unique circumstance.  While these were all examples of hawks getting chased by crows, they were not taken as evidence of a general condition that crows chase hawks. 

But then I’d see a pack of seagulls kicking some proud hawk around, and it’s flapping and banking and getting trapped in a pincers move that sends it into a screaming dive, desperate for escape….  Okay, seagulls can be pretty tough too.  But still, it doesn’t really reflect very well on the hawk.

And now I realize that it’s not even that unusual to see my valiant and beautiful hawks being chased ignobly by a craven handful of guttersnipe sparrows.  I have nothing against sparrows as a species; they’re fine little birds and nice enough, I suppose; I suppose I see them as to pigeons, as squirrels are to rats…. And squirrels are fine, all things being equal.  They’re cute and they have their place in the universal Ark.  But really, who’d expect to see a squirrel chasing away, for example, a puma?  And what self-respecting hawk would let himself get asspecked by sparrows?

They’ve got some recovering and disabled hawks at the zoo; I’ve seen some of them up close.  They’ve got really dangerous talons and their beaks gleam with pure honed viciousness.  I can only think that if some hawk wanted to bring his “A” game and take out a seagull that was pissing him off, he’d be able to do it.  He’s fully equipped for the job.  But for some reason, he doesn’t.  Could it possibly be that he can’t defend himself?  What kind of a world would that be, where sparrows harass hawks with impunity, and the hawks can’t do a thing about it? 

But if he’s capable, as it seems all too obvious that he is, of clipping that sparrow’s wings, has he actually chosen to restrain himself?  Can a hawk decline to fight a belligerent sparrow? Or even a bad-ass raven?  From what I see, the answer is yes, but I’m only just realizing that I have no idea why.