Predators

This pair of red tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) lazily glided figure eights across the sky above my head this morning. They follow the currents of the Assabet River, grazing meadows for prey. Once a month or so they find themselves sweeping over the Mill Pond and our neighborhood. I heard them from inside, that distinctive screetch (click on the title "Predators" to hear it). Is that a teradactyl outside? It has been used for movie birds, hawks and eagles, their voice. The oldest sayings recommend paying fine attention to the content of your thoughts when presented with an eagle or hawk. They are bearers of the necessity to reflect. What was I thinking this fine autumn morning with the sun alone in the blue sky and the cold air of overnight quickly warmed when these graceful birds wafted overhead? How were the contents of my thoughts as the screetch pierced my brain with its unusual cadence? They swept overhead in wide circles, in opposite directions, apart, together, apart, together, moving downstream with the pace of a stroller or saunterer. I heard them screetch. I was noting the joys of community in my journal before I ran outside.

The red tail hunts birds, among other prey. The unlucky victims, so say the experts, are beheaded before being consumed whole. The hawks' screetch scares up the ground critters and, with eyesight that can find a mouse at 100 feet, they usually stay well fed. A kill site is bloody, scarred land, full of fur clumps or feathers, claw marks, and undigestible internal organs. Behind the graceful beauty of the hawk is a cold calculus. They must eat, and feed their hungry young. This bloody claw disturbed Darwin and came to symbolize the ugly underside of natural selection, the appalling potential of natural impulses. I feel his pain as I reflect on the carnage left behind by a hawk's meal. But the hawk must eat. What precisely is our excuse? How much unnecessary death marks modernity and the supposed maturation of culture? What prices of incivility are paid beyond the needed costs? The problem is not the existence of bloody claws, but the excessive bloodiness by which we make our every day. No grace, or figure eights, just brute strength exercised in the only way possible. The hawks watch for hours, they rest on currents of air, they take their time and only what they need.