Hawk Watching

Last year I saw a hawk catch a bird in my garden, and now I know how many ways predation can go wrong. It was early spring, and the dry stalks rattling beside her in the wind put the Cooper's hawk on edge. To worsen her earthbound perch, a chain-link fence blocked her escape on one side, a saskatoon bush hemmed her on the other, and electrical wires congested the sky. She had blazed down a utility easement and surprised the starling as it pecked at shriveled berries fallen from the bush. The prostrate prey lay upside down beneath one clenched set of talons, writhing and very much alive.

The hawk stretched and craned to see if she was safe. Her eyes shone red. My bedroom window hid me from her view. I say her because females are larger than the males. Cooper's hawks display one of the largest size differences of any bird of prey. So large, even experts mistake the male Cooper's for the female sharp-shinned hawk. Had she laid a clutch of eggs she would have been on the nest, the male doing the hunting.

She rose atop the starling, nineteen inches tall, the size of a large crow, to get a clearer view of her environs. She loomed bigger than any hawk I'd ever come across in our woodland neighborhood. But all I could see from the bedroom window was squeezed by scale—her broad and checkered breast looming over the throttled songbird in her grasp. At last she relaxed, her outline fell, she bent head to her task and began to pluck.

Alfred Tennyson recoiled from what he saw as a cycle of eating, breeding, and dying that prevents transcendence. His friend had just died, entered the carbon cycle, and the poet felt ill enough at heart to condemn "nature red in tooth and claw." Decades after his friend's death, Tennyson got awarded a knighthood. But predation has its way with the world no matter what Parliament decrees. Inside the bedroom I was bending, intent to watch the preying game play out, the talons flex. I trained my eyes on her every move.

When I was a child on my family's Seattle acreage, Cooper's hawks had orbited our pigeon coop, a peaked ark fifteen feet long by eight wide. Its high hatch allowed the homing birds to wing in and out at will. Such coops, known as dovecotes in Europe and the Middle East, produced eggs, flesh, and dung. Ours provided pleasure only, part of a backward plan to send the pigeons out as carriers. We knew the Cooper's hawk only as a "pigeon hawk" in those days, squaring it against inherited philosophy that humans were the ultimate aim of the universe. My parents had moved out of the city before I was born. Had drained the marsh, cleared the alders and cedars, and established pastures for a hobby farm. One of my after-school chores was to fill the water and grain troughs in the coop.

A flock of pigeons proved to be a sore temptation to other predators besides the hawks. Raccoons captured the squabs whenever they could. Brown rats—aka sewer rats, the great Rattus norvegicus from Norway—slipped through cracks in the door and floor of the coop, scaled the walls, and crept along the bird roosts seven feet above the ground. There they tried to pick off feathered fruit. A rat and its scaled tail could stretch some twenty inches—a chilling sight to stare down at you when you're eight years of age. Those mostly nocturnal brown rats, burrowing underground where daytime hawks could never see them to seize them, naturalized and thrived in Seattle's tender weather.

The native hawks had preceded humankind by millennia. Even so they seemed to us to be the invaders. They infringed on our exceptional rights to rule over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, and over every living creature that moved upon the ground. Hawks that orbited our pigeon coop and sometimes assailed a pigeon, we could view them...