Trying to identify the hawks in my backyard prepares me for back-to-school season
I’ve been pondering rather a lot in regards to the hawks who return to dwell in my yard late eachspring. Are they Cooper’s hawks? Sharp-shinned? Even practiced birders may relent and log these birds as both/or.
In my neighborhood, a pair of small however vociferous falcons have currently been troubling my hawks, taking turns dive-bombing them in spectacular shows of aerial loops and twirls, intimidation via velocity, agility and dedication. The hawks simply take it, hunched and resigned on a close-by phone pole, like mute, stationary gargoyles guarding their citadel.
It’s merlins — small falcons as soon as referred to as “woman hawks” within the medieval hierarchy of falconry — which might be hectoring my hawks. Their measurement belies their ferocity. Their affiliation with the feminine may make one assume that my affection lies with these small however mighty birds, nevertheless it doesn’t. Hawks converse to me of residence. It’s to them that I pay my allegiance.
My hawks have constructed an excellent hulking nest — a protected home — within the pine tree that begins in my yard. To the dismay of my neighbor, a few of its tangled branches and messy needles fall into his. The nest, nonetheless, is on my facet of the property line, so I’ve claimed the citadel, so to talk, despite the fact that throughout nesting season it’s the hawks who rule my yard.
I’ve typically wandered into what’s clearly their area to carry out some inconsequential chore — going to the shed for a hammer, scratching my canine’s ears — solely to be swooped down upon and warned that my time exterior is over. When these battle traces are drawn, I retreat.
Generally when I’m studying on my deck, one in every of my hawks will land on the jacaranda tree above me, virtually inside touching distance. He and I’ll sit in what, at finest, is an uneasy detente, his eyes skilled on me, contemplating, it appears, simply how meek and ridiculous I’m. In my subservient place, I’ve ample time to contemplate the colour of his wings, the rust-colored striations on his chest, the form of his head. Sure, I feel, Sharp-shinned hawk. And after he has turned and left, I rush inside to examine my discipline guides — and my outdated doubts settle in but once more. There was a sure squaring off of the pinnacle that speaks of a Cooper’s hawk, and my insistence on an accurate label for my hen stays unmet.
Maybe this wrestle just isn’t a nasty factor. Maybe labels are meaningless. A label, a definitive title, “is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face,” nor some other a part of consequence.
The lack to label these birds jogs my memory of my center college classroom, the place the disparate voices of my college students maintain sway, and their temperaments defy absolute identification. They’re discovering the attract of their very own voices.
Although I’m not a falconer (I don’t “a-hawking go”) it strikes me that the artwork of falconry has a lot in frequent with the artwork of instructing.
I like to consider my classroom as a protected home, full of college students defying labels. Is that this boy, who refuses to have a look at the display screen once I present images and movies, on the spectrum? How would I label a woman who strikes stealthily amongst her friends but reveals such elegant vulnerability in her prose? I do know that the boy who swaggers into the room, chest puffed out, making himself fill the house together with his discontent, is doing so to cover his disappointment over his dad and mom’ divorce. How then ought to I label him?
It’s best, I feel, to see my college students as fledglings, whose temporary forays into the world haven’t but geared up them to tackle all of its wonders and ills. Higher to log them as both/or and respect their scrumptious complexity for the temporary months that I take pleasure in their firm.
As summer time wanes, and months of being woke up by the calls of my hawks, residing beneath the scrutiny of their gaze, observing their nesting, hovering, diving and touchdown, they’ve left me. The silence overwhelms my yard, a lot because it descends upon my classroom annually when June arrives.
However now that my hawks are gone I can tidy up: shelve my binoculars, rake up the pile of blue jay and mockingbird feathers beneath their nest. I may even sleep in just a little later — a short respite earlier than I put together for the brand new college yr.
Wendy Schramm lives and teaches in North San Diego County.
