Laura Erickson's For the Birds

I’m writing this with a handsome little male Sharp-shinned Hawk sitting in a box next to me. He’s at least three years old—I can tell his age by his brilliant red eyes. When I found him he had just one eye open. He’d smacked into a neighbor’s window knocking his beak out of whack and hurting his back. In struggling to get under a bush he apparently scraped one eye on the ground, and the shut lid was dry and encrusted with mud. I gently bathed the eye until he opened it; fortunately, the pupil was responsive. But his legs and wings didn’t work, and when I pulled him out from under the bush he seemed to be in shock.

For a while I held him on my lap, to keep him upright while I gave him small amounts of water and Pedialyte. But as soon as I could set up a box with rolled up towels to support him, I put him in it. It’s not a kindness to hold a Sharpie on your lap.

We humans believe in compassion and nurturing those more helpless than we, but not Sharp-shinned Hawks. Any doubt that they shouldn’t kill every weaker thing dies in the nest. A hungry nestling Sharpie that hesitates to eat its smaller brother or sister is destined to feed its brothers and sisters. For a Sharpie, the only urge stronger than hunting and self preservation is procreation, and that’s part of a Sharpie’s psyche for only a very brief period in spring and summer. Sharp-shinned Hawks do not mate for life, or even keep ties with their own babies from one year to the next. This is probably a mercy, since Sharpies lead such dangerous lives that most young don’t survive long.

When a human picks up an injured Sharp-shinned, the little hawk has no doubt whatsoever what the human’s intentions are. Talking softly, gently ministering to its wounds, delicately preening its feathers—none of this feels merciful to a hawk, because a hawk has absolutely no concept of mercy. It’s not that hawks are cruel or malicious. They kill because they live, and they live because they kill. Their lives last until something kills them.

So “my” little Sharpie glares at me with wild red eyes filled with the arrogance that so distinguishes hawks and eagles. My American Heritage Dictionary defines arrogant as “overly convinced of one’s own importance; overbearingly proud; haughty.” The birthright of a hawk is the absolute certainty that its life is worth the death of one or two littler birds every day it spends on earth. Hawks never question their right to kill, never toy with the thought of becoming vegetarians, never wonder about the nature of fairness, or the fairness of nature. I couldn’t help myself—it’s something in my own human bones that makes me talk gently to hurt birds, and in most cases it does serve to calm them, helping to dispel at least some stress, improving their prognosis. So I talked to this little Sharpie who watched me suspiciously, waiting for me to come in for the final kill. He was hungry enough to take strained meat baby food off my finger, and he followed me with his eyes even as his body remained securely between the towels in the box. I didn’t want him to feel my pity, but overall I think hawks understand pity less than any other warm-blooded creatures on the planet, and don’t mind it because they don’t even recognize it. They just want their privacy and their space, and their freedom, and their life.

This little Sharpie is headed for the Raptor Center in the Twin Cities, where they have fairly good luck with these kinds of injuries, and when he’s released he’ll be surprised that no one ate him when we all had such good opportunities. He won’t be grateful—just relieved to make such a surprising getaway, ready to return to his predatory ways and his wild, arrogant, happy, dangerous, all-too-brief life. Even though I sometimes think I dislike hawks for their arrogance and their killing ways, looking into his eyes, I know I’m going to be happy and relieved to know that he’s out there, arrogant and killing once again.