Cornell Pilgrimage Part 2: Hawks

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Raptor Geek Squad minus one (I'm behind the camera...)

I shared in the previous post about our visit to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on Saturday. On the way to the lab, we stopped to observe the red-tailed hawks featured in their nest cam, Big Red (the female) and Ezra (the male).

We found the nest without much difficulty and had only just settled ourselves when Big Red flew from a tree nearby to roost on the light pole next to the one with the nest. Ezra was taking his turn sitting on the eggs.

Big Red is perched on the lefthand side of the lefthand light pole. The nest is on the righthand pole.

The hawk nest now in use is on the lower tier in the center. The one on the upper right is an old one. This pair has roosted here for 4 years. The one they're using now seems like it would provide better protection from the wind.

A minute later she flew to a nearby building. She had a ledge in a cranny of the building that protected her somewhat from the wind as she preened, stretched, and kept track of what was going on around her.

Probably a common sight for Cornellians.

She was there for perhaps 45 minutes. It was beautiful out, but chilly with the wind, and though we really wanted to see them switch places on the nest, we finally decided to set the limit at 5 more minutes and then we’d get back in the car. She must have heard us, and like true royalty, she graciously obliged.

I’m being excessive with the images, aren’t I? It was just a treat to get to see her in flight. The nest cam shows us the hawks only in the fascinating but limited situation of their nest. It’s in the air that their strength and beauty really shine. I never get tired of seeing the wings unfurl.

It was interesting to me that she stayed always within sight of the nest. She  didn’t go far at all, and she didn’t do any hunting while we were there. After leaving the building, she circled a few times overhead and then landed at the edge of the nest pole, waddled along the platform to the nest, and switched places with Ezra.

The lighting and the distance (and the amateur photographer) make for grainy photos here, but we were glad to see them make the switch! Ezra is skydiving off the nest in this pic.

He circled us, seeming to check us out before sailing away — probably to hunt. I remember reading in A Wing in the Door that the oil on their feathers absorbs the vitamin D from the sunlight, and when they preen they ingest it. Assuming that’s true, the hawks had a vitamin-rich day to soar.

So long, Ezra!

We couldn’t have asked for a better experience observing these two! Hopefully we’ll make it back after the hawk and heron eggs have hatched.

*Edited to add: I’ve created a fuller set of the day’s hawk photos on Flickr.

Heronry and Ornithology Field Trip

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We have a heronry — a community of great blue heron nests — on the Susquehanna River not far from us. My husband and the girls and I have visited a couple of times this week.

From a distance, it looks like this:

I count around 30 nests — dark blobs in the sycamores, across the river from where we’re standing. But through the zoom lens, you can see that it’s abuzz with activity.

It’s a combination tenement and helipad. They live on top of one another, sometimes standing and stretching, sometimes nesting, sometimes taking off or coming in for a landing. Sometimes they engage in conjugal activities in plain view. These birds “do community” with intensity.

One evening last week, we passed a plowed field with a number of herons on it, not far away from the heronry. Older Daughter remembered reading in Longlegs the Heron that herons will eat meadow mice, as well as aquatic creatures. I suppose they must have been hunting.

We stopped to look at the heronry Saturday en route to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for a family field trip. I’ll write more about that tomorrow. But it seems to fit with this post to mention that while there, we observed the heron nest on which they have their cameras and scopes trained these days, on the pond just outside the lab.

In contrast to the busy heronry we observed on the way there, this nest has a lonely look, and the heron looks a little dejected. Much though I enjoy tuning in to the nest cam from time to time, I found myself feeling a little ambivalent about it when I saw the peering camera directly over the heron’s head as he sat on the nest.

It was still neat to see it, and to see the hawks featured in the nest cam as well. I’ll post about that tomorrow. Meantime, here are a few of the other sights from around Cornell’s lab.

White-throated sparrow

Song sparrow

Kingfisher

Goldfinch brightening into summer plumage

I’ll restrain myself from posting all the pics I took. :-) Suffice it to say that it was a perfect day — we couldn’t have asked for better weather, better sights, or better time together.

Easter Advent

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Pictorial narrative by my youngest

I love the range of emotions Younger Daughter gives to Jesus — anger, as he clears the Temple (we see the effects — spilled money, freed doves — but not Jesus himself); serene happiness as he shares the Last Supper with his friends; grief as he prays in Gethsemene; and an unreadable, inaccessible expression on the cross. (His eyes are X’s.)

I’m realizing that the lesson for me this Easter is that I need to love the world. Not exactly new, is it? But I’m realizing in a deeper way the subtle rejections that run like tripwires through my personality. It’s an insight provoked by the suffering hawk I saw the other day. I realize there is evil and pain on a far greater scale in the world. But we live and learn in the small-scale events of our own lives, the unavoidable things stuck under our noses, and the sight of this particular instance of gratuitous suffering seemed to reawaken the never-far-from-the-surface distress about all of it. All of it is traceable, ultimately, to the sin we humans brought into being.

“How do you feel about it?” I asked God. “You made the creatures that suffer. You don’t stop it from happening. Yet your word speaks all the time of how precious your creation is to you. I know of some of the explanations people give for why you allow it. But how do you deal with it? Surely it bothers you more.”

“I love,” he replied immediately.

I’ll be a long time wringing out all that this answer means. But I know that it’s what this weekend is about. Jesus descended into the worst pain, the worst consequences of sin, out of love. He didn’t reject suffering. He didn’t wish for a different world, or erase this one and start over, or turn his back and let it spin inevitably into destruction. He entered it fully, embraced his dreadful calling fully, without reservation.  That is what love does. Or maybe, that is the condition for love to come into being. As long as there is some holding back from involvement in the whole bloody mess of a fallen world, as long as there is some waiting for a better option, as long as there is some resentment about the terms of our existence here on this earth, there can’t be true love.

I can’t conjure up such love either. I am not capable. All I can do is ask God to create it in me through his spirit. It’s an incredible prayer, made prayable by Jesus’ triumphal entry into his suffering world.

We have been unwrapping items in our Easter countdown basket. These are the ones we’ve opened so far:

And these are the ones that remain to be unwrapped today and tomorrow.

On our way home from a wonderful Good Friday service last night, as the girls discussed the way candles had figured into both Advent and Good Friday services, Older Daughter said, “Advent in a word that means ‘countdown,’ isn’t it?”

“It’s a word for ‘coming,’” I replied. “At Advent we celebrate Jesus’ coming into the world. At Easter, in a way, we’re celebrating his going — and the Holy Spirit’s coming.”

Both Christmas and Easter are Advents. Maybe I have always seen Easter as marking Jesus’ departure. This year I’m aware in a new way that it marks his arrival.

Potential

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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.

The Storm

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Have you ever had an author that wins you over slowly? One that you’ve returned to over the years despite reservations until one day it clicks?

I’ve had that experience with the writings of Frederick Buechner. I bought Listening to Your Life, a collection of excerpts from his writings, on February 24, 1993; I know this because the receipt is still slipped in among the pages as a bookmark. I have yet to read every entry, but I am always drawn to it in the spring. A year or two ago, I read The Sacred Journey. And more recently, I read The Alphabet of Grace.

There is something uncompromisingly honest about Buechner’s writing. He has a poet’s sensibility, and a sense of humor. These are all things that draw me back. But there have always been frustrations for me as well, the chief one being his refusal to talk with much certainty about theological matters. This has bothered me, yet I’m coming to realize that this is probably one of the deepest chords that he strikes within me. I don’t know that my uncertainties are Frederick Buechner’s, but his style of being Christian even amidst his uncertainties has extended a grace and a courage to me. He doesn’t speak for me in the particulars, but simply by existing he does reinforce that there is room for me in the fold.

This week I read The Storm, my first of his novels, and I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s about a fragmented family populated by characters who are at once broken, and extremely decent and likable. Every one of them has eccentricities. Every one of them has desires that have yet to be realized or even, in some cases, defined. They have varying levels of comfort within their own skin, and most of them have regrets. The main character, if there is one, is Kenzie Maxwell, who almost every day remembers a sin from years earlier, and almost every day he still tries to make restitution. The novel is loosely structured around his search for, and at least partial arrival in, rest.

For plot summary, you can probably do better by reading the description over at Amazon. But for reaction, all I can say is that whenever I closed the book to go do something else, I put it down with a smile. I just really liked the people in this book, and I enjoyed the humor and affection with which Buechner develops them. I sensed something of the same refusal to simplify or prettify these characters as he demonstrates in his attitude toward Christianity, and I recognized the same beauty and wonder persisting in his vision of human life and the mystery that surrounds us. It’s not an overly ambitious story, not terribly long or complex, but very real in a way that amounted to pure delight for me.

The idea of Listening to Your Life, the devotional I mentioned earlier, is on the first page:

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

Surely this includes listening to your reading life. If mine tells part of my story, I seem to have passed a milestone into liking Buechner without reservation. It’s always worth noting when I become less critical of someone or something! — and often it means I’m becoming less critical of certain aspects of myself. Maybe it’s a beginning of something good.

While reading The Storm, I searched online and found a bit more information about Buechner. I found this piece, and watched this interview. Both are interesting for those who want to “meet” this author outside of his books.

Faces

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To say he had a face is to say that like the rest of us he had many faces as the writers of the Old Testament knew who used the Hebrew word almost exclusively in its plural form. To their way of thinking, the face of man is not a front for him to live his life behind but a frontier, the outermost, visible edge of his life itself in all its richness and multiplicity, and hence they spoke not of the face of a man or of God but of his faces. The faces of Jesus then — all the ways he had of being and of being seen. (Frederick Buechner)

I’ve been looking through The Faces of Jesus, which I picked up at the library. It’s a collection of artistic representations of Jesus through the ages, divided into six sections: Annunciation, Nativity, Ministry, Last Supper, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. Frederick Buechner wrote the text, which is how I discovered the book.

It is fascinating and, as one might expect, unsettling. It brings me face to face again with the strand of violence running through my faith. Given the season, I’ve dwelt more on the pictures of the last three sections, and though I think part of the Easter season is grappling again with the horrors as well as the blessings of Christ’s life, it’s not easy. I guess I’m glad. I’m glad it isn’t tamed by familiarity.

One of the dramatic moments in our decision to homeschool happened during this season. My oldest was in public school kindergarten, and it was the first year we did our Easter countdown using objects from the story. (I mention the countdown tradition in this post.) I remember that what Jesus had gone through for us sank in for her, and she said, “That’s terrible!” and looked hard at my face to make sure she was understanding it right — and, I believe, to make sure I, too, recognized how terrible it was.

It was a powerful moment for me. “I want to be in on more of these moments of revelation,” I thought.

If you are a visual person or an artistic person, you would probably find this book to be a rich source for meditation. And the text by Buechner reflects his characteristic depth and artistry. I haven’t read every word, but those I have read do what Buechner does best, underscoring the relevance of the Bible’s mysteries and wonders to my everyday life.

The earliest reference to the resurrection is Saint Paul’s, and he makes no mention of the empty tomb at all. But the fact of the matter is that in a way it hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced people that he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.

Herons

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Cornell has a second nest-cam up, this one of a great blue heron nest that’s viewable from their building. It’s incredible that such a large, gangly bird starts as such a tiny egg! I can’t believe what we’ve been able to observe.

We visited Sapsucker Woods a few years ago. I can see another field trip this spring will be a necessity. Between the hawks and the herons, they have too much going on in our fields of interest to resist.