The Raptors of Iowa

The Intensity of Its Gaze

+฀5฀+ Aldo leopold said that he could not live without wilderness. I share that feeling about raptors. I would feel cheated had I not been able to capture and band migrating hawks or climb to raptors’ nests and hold a helpless chick that would become a skilled predator. All youngsters so inclined should have the chance to see what I saw, capture and band hawks, enter into a hunter’s liaison with a bird in falconry, or marvel at the predatory efficiency of a master of the night like the great horned owl. My serious interest in birds began in the mid 1950s, when I took Martin Grant’s field biology course at Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa). However, my exposure to and interest in raptors began much earlier. Every day on our small farm near Lehigh, Iowa, when I was young, I noticed that our flock of chickens would suddenly scramble and hide under anything available in response to a certain sharp note from one of the flock. Soon I realized that this was triggered by the sight of a hawk so distant that it was not visible to me until after the initial fright note had sounded. This intrigued me because the chickens were so young that they had probably never seen a hawk previously. The word “instinct” meant nothing to me then, but I pondered the improbability. qr the intensity of its Gaze Dean M. Roosa . qr +฀6฀+ +฀6฀+ Many years later, my wife, Carol, and I stepped out of the back entrance of our business in Ames to see rock pigeons sitting, hiding really, on the ground behind trash cans and under cars, sitting so tightly that we could have easily picked them up. I said that a peregrine falcon must surely be in the vicinity. Soon an immature female peregrine floated over the alley. Again this interested me because most of the pigeons were young of the year and had certainly never seen a peregrine, or any other raptor, previously. But by now the power of instinct was no mystery to me. When I was about eight or nine, my brother and I saw a small hawk flitting about our farm. For some reason, now unimaginable to me, we grabbed our single-shot .22 caliber rifle and followed the bird toward the woods. An unlucky shot brought this bird tumbling from the top of a tree. I can still see every detail of the landscape, the weather, the time of day, the hickory tree standing alone on a slight knoll . . . everything. There I stood with a beautiful hawk dying in my hands. We had no way of learning the bird’s identity, but much later I realized it was a male American kestrel, one of our truly exotic-looking birds. Later, when I trapped and banded kestrels as a hobby, this scene replayed for me each time I took one from the trap and held it before releasing it. One late fall day at about this same time, I noted a stream of hawks floating past a wooded hillside above the Des Moines River. I went to an ancient dump rake where I could sit and observe this passage of birds. For several hours, until dusk arrived, a steady parade of birds emerged from behind the woodland—a sight I have never seen in central Iowa since. At one point a bird changed course and came speeding low over the ground to snatch a sparrow from among a flock in a bush a few feet from where I sat. Thinking back on this, I realize now that these were principally accipiters—Cooper’s hawks and sharp-shinned hawks—surely the spectacular capture of the sparrow was achieved by a sharp-shin. Again I wondered how they knew where to go; what was their guiding light? I do remember that the following days brought deteriorating weather and strong winds. In retrospect, I now realize that +฀7฀+ +฀7฀+ what followed was probably the famous Armistice Day storm of 1940, which created conditions that urged a huge migration. I remember nothing of the blizzard, but everything of the hawks that poured out over the landscape on that raw day. Also at about this time, I remember looking out our front window on a Sunday afternoon to see a large bird sitting on a chicken it had just killed. The scene was...