The snow is
still very thick, despite a few days of thawing -- the first thaw in weeks --
so as I walk around the salt marsh by the shore the footing is laborious. You
sink a little with each step and there's no pace to it, no momentum, since with
every step your foot may sink through the crust and drop down a few inches.
This making the act of walking work and not the dream-like rhythm of meditative gliding through open, natural spaces.
The smell
of salt in the air from the few days' melting keeps me going. But
after a while I tire of the slow pace and cut into the woodsy upland where the snow is easier
to traverse. I bypass a section of the marsh path where I am likely to see anything besides Canada
geese, the one species that appears happy to flock among the brown marsh grass
emerging from the snow. I haven't seen any wading birds around here all winter.
After
cutting through the woods, I decide to return to the tail end of my marsh path
to have a look at the other side of things. My noisy, unexpected emergence causes a large
bird to start from the woods and fly soundlessly over the marsh toward a thin line
of trees by the roadway. It's too far away to get much of a look,
but its flight is silent and decisive and a part of me thinks "hawk."
Coincidentally
or not, a pair of ducks squawk a little and fly back toward me away from the
flight line of my mystery bird. Some of the Canada geese grazing in the snow honk
and flutter closer to the others, as if the flock were reflexively pulling
together. I try to mark the place where the bird disappeared among trees -- it lines
up, from my point of view, near a parked red pickup -- and finish my circuit of
the marsh trail. A few bluejays fly across my path.
As a last
gasp, I get into my car and drive slowly
down the street where the large bird disappeared into the roadside trees. It's
a Sunday in gray, wet February, nobody else on the road, and I'm about to give
up the search. The red pickup has disappeared. I come up to a slight curve that
leads shortly to an elementary school. I think 'just a few trees more' -- and
then, suddenly, there it is. A very large, rounded gray-feathered presence, perched on the
branch of a very thin tree.
It's a
hawk, and it's not making much of an effort to stay out of sight. I stop the
car just where I am, the back end of the vehicle sticking out into the roadway, and take
my simple point-and-shoot digital camera into the street with me. Then it's a
matter of how close he'll let me get. I pause in the street. The motion of
lifting the camera to my eye doesn't disturb him.
The bird is
aware of me and turns his head from side to side to keep one of those hawk eyes
on me. But his attitude seems to say, 'oh, it's just some dude with a camera.'
I get
closer, start shooting. Get a little closer still. The light is poor; gray,
dull. I'm trying to pick out markings but only those dark bands on its breast stand
out. I'm not about to work my way around him, into the marsh, to shoot from
behind. That strikes me as intrusive, rude.
And I
decide I'm not going to push myself literally as close as I can get to him, get in
his face so to speak, and make him fly off. My presence with the camera is
intrusion enough. Anything more crosses the line into disrespectful, bad
manners. Besides, it's wrong to make wild creatures use up energy unnecessarily.
From the
images I find of hawks with banding across the breast, I tentatively identify
it as a red-tailed hawks (tentative is as far as any of my identifications go).
They're the most common hawks around here anyway.
The next
day I go back to the marsh, without seeing the hawk anywhere.
The day
after that I drive slowly down the same street and, again to my surprise, find the
hawk once more in what has to be the same tree. Only this time he has his back
to me, turned into the wind.
No one else
driving by stops, or even slows. Oh, well, the world seems to say. A huge old hawk perched
roadside in a city of 90,000 people. No big deal.
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