On hawks and hope
The Harris hawk lands in the abundant white hair on the head of a tall, elegant man standing in the crowd gathered in Wassaic, NY. Both man and bird hold themselves still before the medium-sized raptor scans the sky, spreads its wings and returns to Tommy Cullen’s gloved fist for a bite of raw meat. The Cullen family who are running this demonstration keep dozens of birds of prey in the nearby town of Goshen. It’s their business. They host falconry walks, train apprentices, provide raptors for movie work and even weddings. They recently cleared Grand Central Station of 16 problematic pigeons with three Harris hawks. They care for injured birds of prey like the enormous African Eagle that comes out next. It stands slightly lopsided on third-year apprentice Jimmy’s gloved fist, as he explains that its talons have the psi of the jaws of a grizzly bear. Talons, I might add, that are bigger than my hands. The bird’s left wing was broken when it was young and healed in a way that prevents it from ever flying again. Through a series of well-meaning, continental movements, this bird has come to the Cullens, and will live out its natural life cared for in captivity with them. Still young, maybe four or five years old, the Eagle will live for up to 50 years. My heart wrenches for this creature, perched in relative comfort, its enormous wings unevenly spread only for balance or in moments of anxiety for decades to come.
I try to imagine myself with a hawk. Most likely a red-tail (or as country people where I grew up and in lots of places call them, chicken hawks) because these are the commonest hawk to apprentice with in the Northeast. I know this because my friends Allan and Julie Shope—who organized and invited me and a small group of interested folks to this event—catch a red-tail nearly every November. It’s the time of year when young red-tails are most vulnerable, and it’s also the only time of year that is legal to capture them.
The Harris hawk rebels again, landing on a young woman’s wooly hat this time, before lurching upward and alighting further away behind the crowd, in a tall white pine by the low stone building we’re all standing around. Tommy and Jimmy whistle and jiggle bits of food in their fists. “The wind interfered with him flying back to us,” Tommy explains. “If he weren’t high enough in that tree to see us, we’d have to walk around the building to get him back. Birds of prey are sight-based.” Another few seconds tick by before the wind settles, and the hawk glides to Jimmy’s glove.
Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk is a glorious literary testament to her deep interest in falconry, going back to her childhood, and also a chronicle of her grief in the aftermath of her father’s death. Mabel, her goshawk, helps Macdonald mourn, as she demonstrates the meaning of wild up close.
She is not a duke, a cardinal, a hieroglyph or a mythological beast, but right now Mabel is more than a hawk. She feels like a protecting spirit. My little household god. Some things happen only once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them. I had thought the world was ending, but my hawk saved me again, and all the terror was gone.
The grief I carry is less focused than Macdonald’s. It’s a diffuse sorrow that the world—the spinning mass of rock and life that we inhabit and depend on for everything— is suffering, literally enduring a torturous demise, while we carry on exploiting it and everything in it. Working with a hawk each fall, winter, and spring, as my friends do, might ease this pain a bit.
Emily Dickinson famously wrote: “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers” and in so doing, elevated the human capacity for faith in the future and projected a kind of positive ambition. The lines are enduring and poignant, and for many, serve as a gateway to Dickinson’s poetry. By the end of the Cullens’ demonstration and discussion about falconry, I thought: maybe falconry is the thing with hope.
It hadn’t occurred to me until that day that falconry was anything more than an age-old tradition of humans hunting by proxy. But what I took away from last Sunday’s gathering, was the role that falconry can play in raptor survival.
Adolescent hawks, while formidable in size, are still novices their first winter. They make mistakes hunting that can lead to starvation, they can be killed by other predators, including the Great Horned owl, and they can have mishaps with manmade things—cars, electric lines, wind turbines, and even encounter poison. They often rely on road-kill to survive and don’t mature sexually until 18 months to three years. Working with a young hawk—called a passage hawk—generally helps them return to the wild in peak physical condition as they are ready to mate.
Macdonald relies on author T.H. White’s account of working with a goshawk 50 years before she does as a kind of literary id to her ego. Her recounting of White’s trials with his goshawk—his mistakes, misperceptions, his sometimes cruelty, along with his misguided emotional projections onto the bird—are painful to read about. Mabel gets more humane, and appropriate, treatment in Macdonald’s care than Gos did in White’s.
There are no perfect interactions between humans and animals. Even the Cullens have had their problems. Whatever their past mistakes may be, their demonstration opened me up to the idea that catching and working with a an adolescent hawk can be an act of compassion and conservation. Macdonald’s book reminded me that to take on a hawk is to take on the current state of one’s own psyche. Maybe by next November I’ll be ready.
Jimmy holding injured African Eagle
