Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists

7. Sweet Reasonableness

In the fall of 1927, George Miksch Sutton, a bird artist and ornithologist from Pennsylvania, accompanied the state’s game protector, Archie Smith, to a mountain ridge on the county line between Berks and Schuylkill, hoping to see the impressive hawk migration that had been rumored for several years. The two men were not disappointed. “Several gunners accompanied Mr. Smith to a point along the mountain past which the hawks flew in numbers, and secured, in a remarkably short time, a total of ninety sharp-shins, sixteen Goshawks, eleven Cooper’s Hawks (Accipter cooperi), thirty-two Red-Tailed Hawks (Buteo borealis borealis), and two Duck Hawks (Rhynchodon peregrinus anatum).” Cars lined the rutted dirt road up to the Kittatinny Ridge’s craggy lookout, and hunters from the nearby towns of Pottsville and Reading piled out with guns and ammunition. It was the season of the sparebenbarich, as the locals called the hawkkilling spree in the patois of the Pennsylvania Dutch. Within a few October weekends, thousands of hawks and eagles were “secured”—to use Sutton’s word. Even ospreys, which the Pennsylvania Game Commission had determined were birds useful to men and ought not be shot, wound up among the dead and dying. The Kittatinny’s autumn hawk hunt depended on an anomaly of topography and weather. After the season’s first blast of cold air, dry winds from Canada blew south and struck the [ chapter seven Sweet Reasonableness 152 ] chapter seven Appalachian massif. The convergence of wind, mountain, and hawks mimicked on a grand scale the partnership of a whisk broom with a dustpan and their power over scattered crumbs. Thousands of hawks that had summered along the wide eastern continental flyway were brushed into the narrow seam along the mountain face to be swept by the winds on to their fall migration route. The birds soared for miles on currents that rose from the warm land, catching each new thermal cell faster than the previous one cooled and sank to earth. Observing that raptors did not flap their wings the way other migratory birds did because of this ability to ride the rising warm air, Wilbur and Orville Wright applied the same principle to keep their first gliders aloft. Gliding from one thermal cell to the next gave the birds an opportunity to rest on their journey, which for some species was up to five thousand miles. Along the Kittatinny portion of this seasonal and geographical anomaly, however, hawks flew within yards of poised hunters, and at gun-sight level. For hunters the meeting of mountain and wind presented a different opportunity : the ability to shoot more hawks than anyone had ever seen in one place. This part of the annual anomaly was the only one subject to change. Since hawks and eagles were universally loathed, few thought any change necessary. Heading to the Kittatinny in fall was an act that righted the many wrongs the birds did. For centuries human observers watched in moral horror as hawks snatched innocent birds from midair or skimmed the sky above a forest to drop with missile precision into the treed shadows. In the dark woods a darting rabbit might have caught a bird’s penetrating eye from the sky and would be swiftly skewered. Hawks killed their prey with feet and talons, pinning their meal to the ground as they devoured it or carrying it to a high perch to be shredded. They plucked out feathers or fur and swallowed them and tore with hooked beak into flesh, tendons, and bones. Some hawks landed on an animal with such force that it killed on impact and bloodlessly. Early twentieth-century ornithologists attributed the worst traits of humans to birds of prey. The diminutive sharp-shinned hawk was “the terror of all small birds and the audacious murderer of young chickens,” according to the well-respected Arthur Cleveland Bent. Massachusetts field ornithologist Edward Forbush, another of the nation’s best-known observers of bird behavior, divided sweet reasonableness [ 153 hawks into two categories: the useful and the “pernicious.” The Cooper’s hawk, a pernicious type, was also “crafty,” according to Bent. Forbush said the Cooper’s hawk carried “terror to the hearts of weaker creatures.” A “hush of death” fell over the woods after its loud call, as “all erstwhile cheerful thrushes and warblers become still and silent.” Exiting the forest after feeding, the Cooper’s hawk left a...