Anna Morris, Vermont, USA
The rest of the search party had gone back into the woods. I told them I would stay in the bottomlands, hip-deep in ostrich ferns, looking south at the ridge. We’d been pursuing him for more than two hours now, but hadn’t caught a glimpse in the last forty minutes. The more time passed, the more the lost little broad-wing tugged at my shaking muscles and weakening hope.
The last we’d seen him, he was beating his burgeoning confidence against the light breeze, even trying out a wobbling soar, like his training wheels had just come off. For reasons only he knew, he had popped out of the sugar maple and struck out over the mill pond, circling down until he was lost completely in summer vegetation. There was a faint telemetry signal from the sea of phragmites at the rim of the pond where I now stood, but his path implied the bird had gone back into the forest. This was a more appropriate place for a broad-winged hawk anyway. The rest of the crew trudged back up the ridge to the trail.
If he leapt out of some full-leafed tree and came winging over the pond again, I would surely see him from where I stood. But there was stillness, and haze.
Some distance from me, a pair of gray catbirds took up a scolding duet. heeerWEE! they mewed, staggering their cries, up, then down. eerWEE! I knew I could not see them from where I stood. Juggling my radio in one hand and binoculars in the other, I caught a glimpse of Linda on the trail and called her about the catbirds.
“I hear them, too,” she replied. “I think they’re closer to you.”
Then, “I’ve got even less of a signal up here,” from the telemetry.
A thought, as fleeting as the sight of him: could he have gone down in the pond?
Sometimes hawks get injured in the wild, and sometimes kind people bring them to wildlife rehabilitators for care until they can return to their wild lives. In the summer of 2016, an apple-sized pile of cotton fluff was brought into the rehabilitation clinic at the nature center where I work. It was a nestling broad-winged hawk, far too young to even stand on his own. A woman had found him on the ground near her home, and suspected something was wrong with the tiny, down-coated wing from the way he held it. He couldn’t quite fold it up, tuck it next to his body where it was supposed to rest, like the other did, and a quick examination revealed that the shoulder was dislocated. Were he a human being, the diagnosis would be far from debilitating, but for a bird whose shoulder joint is a complex apparatus of bone and ligament, it meant that he would likely never fly. His crippled shoulder would warp and wrinkle that platypterus—that flat wing—for which his species is named in Latin, and send him furiously wind-milling to the ground in a heap of panting feathers. He would not fly south that autumn, not one foot of the 2,000-mile river of raptors stretching from New England to Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, nor any autumn hence. But a timid, tenacious energy burnt in his little brown eyes.
So we took him into our lives. He swiftly became familiar with the mysteries of people: the ways they moved, the sounds they made, the objects they lifted and carried and presented to him. Neophilia, the behavioral ecologists call it: curiosity, as seen in the young of many species, including our own. He would snatch a proffered stick and break it into little bits with his raptorial beak. He had a flair for destruction, and quickly developed a passion for creating many little things of one large thing: no leaf or paper ball or pine branch was safe. He squeezed leather gloves in his talons seemingly for no other reason than the pleasure of it, and the first time he saw rain drops, he tried to grab them too.
I began a collection of his accomplishments: a headless toy snake, a crushed ping-pong ball, a rubber duck whose neck had been torn open, and a pellet with a bit of bright red fabric packed inside.
He showed me what he was capable of, one morning that first autumn, when I went in to feed him his meal. Seeing the rat haunch and impatient to receive it, the little hawk stooped low on his perch and threw himself across the space between us, landing on my glove 18 inches away. He took the slice of rat in his beak and began eating, wings spread to hide it from me, as if I would take it back. As if I was a sibling, or a rival, and I might, too, want to eat that bloody, raw thing. Of course, I had no thought for the meat—I was struck, quite literally.
Those inches soon stretched to four, five, and six feet, and by the end of the winter he was really flying. Explosively, like a touch-me-not’s spiraling seeds, but he dazzled the small snowed-in crowds at our nature center. The little broad-winged hawk, barely a pound, readied himself by leaning forward on a tall perch, his partly opened wings quivering, the one drooping just a hint, and when I raised my arm he would launch himself vertically into the air like a startled grouse. He pumped his wings in quick pulses, flailing more than flying, the damaged shoulder always falling a bit lower on its downstroke than the other, but he made it, every single time, pouncing onto my fist and with bright eyes and raised hackles, demanding the meaty tidbit he knew he’d earned. We did this over, and over, and over, and with each session his plump broad-wing muscles grew. He worked through, around, and flouting his disability, though the x-rays confirmed his shoulder would never heal, and he was destined to remain in our care for life. At the end of the day I could slip my fingers beneath his chest feathers and feel them, the pectoralis muscles of this little hawk, built like an athlete in spite of it all.
By the time spring came in earnest and his juvenile feathers began to drop, to be replaced by the red-brown broad-wing bars across his chest and a black-and-white signal-flag tail, we were hopeless, he and I. The little hawk sprang to my glove, and I would take him for walks to see the mourning doves in their exhibit, on the trail through the woods by the mill pond, and down to the vernal pool. His bark-brown eyes fixed on this, then that, following a chipmunk rummaging through the leaves, a tiger swallowtail that once beaned him between the eyes.
His head half-cocked to the sky, he would track some distant soaring thing I could not hope to see. When it became chilly and our walks became shorter, he would fluff out his belly feathers to tuck up one foot beneath their warmth after a brilliant morning flight.
I was captivated.
His other trainers found him frustrating, at times. The next spring, he became inexplicably choosy about whose glove he would step onto, to come out of his enclosure and be weighed each morning or taken to a public program. We tried many things, to help him understand that any one of these people was trustworthy, a source of food, or simply a neutral component of his life, but nothing changed his mind.
Soon we simply worked around it. I became the only trainer he would go reliably with. After flatly refusing a large, visible piece of meat from the gloved hand of a colleague, I could step into his enclosure and expect him to cross the whole distance between perch and door for nothing but an unadorned glove. I cannot say it wasn’t secretly endearing, but I still do not know what made him choose me, of any of us. We are not supposed to have favorites among the ambassador raptors, but little broken broad-wings are not supposed to fly.
We were tangled up in each other and could not get unstuck, this tiny hawk and I.
That August morning, I chose him for the outdoor program; he would finish off a group of four of our ambassadors and allow me to explain the magnificent migratory journey his species makes. A healthy broad-winged hawk in the wild completes the 8,000-mile round-trip to and from South America every year of its potentially 18-year lifespan, covering a total distance of 144,000 miles, or more than halfway to the moon. The broad-wing would fly a distance he was more capable of (about 30 feet) between two handlers, of whom by now he was quite accepting, while I spoke. The little bit of breeze coming off the north side of the amphitheater didn’t worry me. If anything, it would give him a boost, and he would fly with more confidence today.
The crowd was large, and typical of summer. A group of young students from a local adventure camp dominated the first few rows. Families with children, tourists from across the northeast, a few staff trying to get out of the office on a beautiful day filled out the benches. The broad-wing’s handlers began his flights, with one holding him up and out so that he could leave the glove when ready, and the other raising their own glove a few seconds later as the cue to fly. The hawk hesitated once, refusing the opportunity, but the second time the cue was offered, he went.
And went.
The wind caught him and he sailed, gaining a few more inches of altitude with each labored flap. I thought he would end up on the ground, then I thought he would stop off in a tree, then I was sure he would land atop the raven enclosure, and then he was gone, above the last rooftop and invisible in the edge of the forest.
I stopped speaking but managed to hide my shock from the audience.
“Does that happen often?” they asked.
“It happens,” I replied. We laughed.
“Will he come back?”
“Oh, yes, he will,” I promised. But I could not know such a thing.
I ended the program as optimistically as I could and joined the search in progress.
Every year, migration season hits us like a punch in the gut. The broad-wing’s weight jumps 15 percent in the fall. He is going to Costa Rica in his mind. His gripping gaze demands more from us. Zugunruhe, migratory restlessness, manifests as a need for more food, more flight, more often. He postures at me through the window of his enclosure: raised feathers on the back of his head like a tiny brown Quetzalcoatl, tail fan hyper-extended, and a low held, inspecting eye. We give him more things to shred to put some good use to this energy. It is supposed to carry him on his broad wings 4,000 miles in just a few weeks.
But there is nowhere for him to go. He is unaware of the wider issue—he can only feel the pull.
So it was that morning when the wind boosted him up to the tree line and he vanished between the branches, a part of me saw the smoothest flight he’d ever achieved and thought, Look, just look at him go!
It does happen, that a bird flies off. All of our flight-trained ambassadors are well vetted for the privilege of flying free, or as free as they are capable with healed-over injuries to wing or eye or foot. They start out small, as the broad-wing did, with mere hops between two gloved hands, a reward of mouse or quail waiting after each success. We shape the behavior of flight with longer and longer approximations of the distance they will one day be asked to go, in an amphitheater for an audience, over weeks of training sessions.
I always laugh to myself when we are asked, “How do you teach the birds to fly?” What could I possibly teach a hawk about flying? We give them a context, and a reason, but they do it all themselves. I may know more about a hawk in flight than your average human off the street, but I remain a grounded, naked nestling in the shadow of their mastery.
Our birds wear telemetry transmitters when flying outside, as insurance against the possibility that they will take the third option in the choice between flying to the gloved hand, or not flying at all.
Another common question is, “What prevents them from flying away?”
The short answer, we know too well, is “Nothing.”
We searched for twenty minutes before we even saw him, as many feet up in a spindly young beech tree. It was a long, careful twenty minutes. Any animal that has evolved for millions of years within a diverse community like New England’s forests is not, no matter how much the individual may be out of place, going to leap out to the eye. One of the rehabilitators, with the eyes of the raptors she treats, finally shouted, pointing him out to the search party. He hadn’t gone more than fifty yards.
The relief of locating him was temporary, though, when it became clear he had no intention of actually coming down. My upraised glove garnered only brief interest, and the entire dead mouse squeezed between my thumb and forefinger received not even a begging peep, nor a tail wag. I made the harsh little kissing noises, that supposedly sound to a hawk like a mouse in distress, and that always made him clench his talons reflexively and begin searching for the meal in question. Today, the forest held much more fascination to him.
Then, the impossible. He lifted his tail, muted, and leaned forward with wings just spread. Searching intently away and above my head—he left.
I glanced at my colleagues: a bit surprised. The wind today was with him, and his strength in flight surpassing. But it was only a glance. We looked for him again.
This happened to us another four or five times. The broad-wing would sit, contented, in a new tree branch far above our heads, ignoring us with offensive audacity. Once he began preening his wrist feathers rather than look at the bloody mouse I proffered. Scorned by the little prince.
Two hours had passed, and we’d been creeping west, closer to the edge of the mill pond all this time. Then, he chose to stay in one spot for over forty minutes. I tucked myself into the base of a nearby tree, refusing to let him out of my sight for a moment. A friend went to get me a bottle of water. In the heat, the bright green leaves of summer formed tessellations stretching out to the edges of my vision, centered on the hawk.
Before I got comfortable, he pushed out over the pond.
No one had wanted to talk about this possibility, but now that we faced it, I found myself crashing down the bank after him toward the water.
He flapped unsteadily, picked up a tiny gust, and soared. The pond wasn’t wide, but it was not quite a quarter of a mile across. None of his tremendous leaps had come close to that distance today. Over the water, he turned and vanished behind a stand of small trees in a forest of phragmites. Gone.
I would have climbed that first beech tree if the branches began a bit lower. I would have tunneled through the purple-flowering raspberry bramble on my knees. I would, right then, have waded in through the sedges and swam after him. I was prepared to grab him with my bare hands, beak and talons and all, prepared for the worst he could do, but not prepared to lose him.
Not this way, not when I had poured so much into him, and he had taken it with a gust of wind and left.
But there were the catbirds.
When I knew they were closest to me, I was not long in deciding what to do next. I hooked my radio onto my back pocket and slung the binoculars behind me, so that they would not be in my way as I pushed through the ostrich ferns. Quite soon I was at the edge of them, though, and at the beginning of the pond in earnest. With my boots I tested the boggy grass and let them fill with pond water, hoping the muddy bottom would not take them.
I kept my ears to the catbirds and sloshed out into the phragmites. It was surprising how far this seeming island of vegetation extended out into the water. The catbirds were in some woody bush, not ten feet in front of me, still scolding something nearby with unceasing meowls, but I could not see them.
For all I knew they were on about an otter, or a raccoon—
A sudden explosion of water and honking sounded off to my left. I froze, and so did the catbirds, as a single Canada goose burst laboriously up out of the pond, climbing, whistling into the air. I apologized, a whisper as it went.
The whole pond sat still then. I couldn’t bring myself to move again. To turn around and go back seemed impossible—I did not want to admit I’d been chasing two catbirds yelling at a goose. I’d been eavesdropping on a common phenomenon called mobbing. When a predator is nearby, or something simply too large is too close to a nest, small birds take up a communal cry to chase the animal off, annoy the wits out of it, or simply ruin its clever ambush. Sometimes the best way to spot an owl in the wild is to follow a group of screaming crows to the source of their outrage. I had hoped, maybe, that the catbirds were yelling at one predator in particular.
But then they started up again, not even a minute later. The robin-sized, gray birds were flitting about in a serviceberry bush just six feet from me. Their black caps upraised, tails held high, they screamed at some horrid violation of their peace that was, in fact, still right in front of them. My pulse quickened.
I took a step into the water in earnest, cold rushing up my calf and down to my toes. The catbirds continued, hopping madly about near my right shoulder. I turned toward them and peered about beneath their bush, pushing some grasses out of the way, and seeing only dark water. The prospect of probing further through the mud was terrifying. I didn’t trust the catbirds to know a drowned hawk from a living one.
The rustling of the disturbed grass rippled outward from us, but just behind my left foot, it seemed to originate anew. I turned.
Thrashing in the phragmites just a yard away, there, suddenly, he was.
The bog in my boots, the catbirds, and the forest faded like a cloud rushing by the sun, and there we were alone together. Me, standing and sweating, having lost my radio in the grass. The broad-wing, grounded in muck, beating his wings ineffectually against the tall plants and panting with the effort. I imagine neither of us quite grasped the unlikeliness of it all, that we could have been so lost, and yet manage to meet again.
I did not think—I reached for him with my bare hands.
Frightened and defensive, he flipped over and footed me, striking and crushing my palm and fingers with one set of knife-point talons, then the other. Relief cascaded through me along the bright spots of pain—good pain, for however strong he gripped me, the surer I had him. The hallux of his right foot opened the meat of my thumb, but I didn’t bleed as it remained stuck. I wrapped my free fingers around his legs and gathered his exhausted wings close, placing my sleeve around his face to give him something to bite, and to calm him down. I took a small moment myself for that purpose.
The world fell back into place, one feather, one fern at a time.
I carried him back to the pond edge like that, sloshing and entangled. We stood still on the shore until both our chests stopped heaving, though still shaking. My radio had fallen off at some point, but I couldn’t have used it if I’d known where it was.
“I have him!” I bellowed toward the ridgeline.
There was an echoing triumphal shout.
The search party found us eventually, even playing a bit of Marco Polo made necessary by the density of bush and fern. Nathan gave me a handkerchief, in place of my sleeve, to cover the broad-wing’s face, and offered to take him.
“No, I’ve got him,” I managed softly.
He had me pretty good, too.
Anna Morris is an environmental educator living in Vermont, USA, with a cat, a dove, and a tortoise. Her poems and prose have been published in Sharkpack Review, Rainy Day Magazine, Silver Blade Magazine, The Fine Line and On the Premises.