Potential

As the girls and I drove home yesterday along a busy thoroughfare, I saw this hawk perched along a popular walking trail. It’s a former railroad bed transformed into a sort of sidewalk, about two miles long, and it’s usually hopping with walkers, runners, bikers, rollerbladers. I had run there myself yesterday morning. But now it was afternoon, and this hawk, visible as I drove along the nearby road, was a very unusual sight.

We pulled over into a restaurant parking lot and watched it for awhile, then went on to do other errands. An hour or more later, I was seized by the urge to go back and see if it was still there, and it was. I decided to park and walk up the trail to see if maybe it was injured… and it was. It was propping itself up with the twigs of the tree it was perched in, and its left leg, as it struggled to fly away, was hanging uselessly.

Since it did manage to fly a ways away, we went home, and I looked up a wildlife rehabilitator. He told me that sadly, there was nothing he could do as long as the hawk can still fly. We would have to wait till it was “down,” and then he could pick it up and take it to a bird rehab. He told us to watch for it and call him if we see it again.

It’s hard to think of it suffering, but we will keep watch. The girls and I have read a couple of books about wounded and rehabilitated hawks — Arrowhawk, and Hawk Hill, both of which remind us that many injured birds pull through with human assistance.

Yesterday evening, my husband and I saw another hawk. It posed a stark contrast, plunging and soaring and wheeling in the evening sky for, it seemed, the sheer joy of it.

He flew over us, then climbed the invisible stair till he was a mere speck. We watched him for awhile, provoking some crows. He would descend to the tree where ten or so of them were perched, taunt them to rise up in pursuit, and then fly off to the west with a cloud of crows in his royal train. Occasionally, he would turn and dive into their midst, scattering them. He did it several times. We joked that he was the Tom Cruise of the hawk world, enjoying the thrill of flying with an enemy on his tail.

The contrast seemed significant this week. One creature, made for flight, and glorying in it; another, equally intended for the heights, but wounded and earthbound, fleeing help. The injured bird needs someone to intervene on its behalf before it can be restored.

Is it too much to hope that the first hawk might end up like the second hawk? Is it too much to hope that I might be able to help? It seems too incredible to think of. Yet it was incredible to have seen the bird at all. Countless people were walking past it, no more than ten feet away, and they never saw it. I, driving past at 50 miles an hour, happened to notice it. So I’m hoping to see the hawk again, hoping to be a part of its restoration. Far more mysterious and wonderful things have happened before.