Friday, March 29, 2013

A Profile in Courage


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                                      A Profile in Courage


The late sun finds a crack in the clouds to aim into a westbound windshield where the road cranks hard right at a hilltop. Last night at that curve an opossum (hereinafter possum) wandered into the road and today's  glare gives a glimpse of a large bird astride the remains.  An instinctive jerk of the wheel puts my car into the oncoming lane, at that moment vacant as I am able to report.  I pull off the road, needing a look at this strange, defiant chicken refusing to yield to traffic. 

I can tell you what I see, but I cannot describe the sadness.  The bird has a ragged wing, a crippled foot, and a tail the color of a faded fire truck. It struggles to hold down its meal with one functioning foot, to balance with one working wing as it tears at morsels of marsupial. A car climbs the hill. The driver reads the road and eases over.  Another, just behind, yanks her wheel at the last instant. The wrecked and famished hawk bends to the possum as if it has no choice, trusting somehow in a universal kindness, standing tall as cars pass but yielding not an inch. 

Car after truck passes the poignant scene. Drivers, bewildered and uncertain at the mayhem in the road, shake it off with quizzical shrugs, perhaps a frown of sympathy. But the outcome seems inevitable and I can not bear to be a witness.  I can't but recall that the last injured Red-tailed Hawk I tried to help treated me to a trip to the ER, blood spurting through a welding glove.   I have no glove today and hawk and possum could hardly have chosen a more parlous platform for their drama. There is no point in adding a human carcass.

So I leave, but the scene travels with me. No, the bird has no choice; a steep bank blocks its way off the road and it cannot fly.   No, I was right not to intervene because the bird’s chances, sparse on a hilltop curve, may be no better under the triage protocol of a resource-strapped raptor center.  And might it fly again, ever,  or soar only in Valhalla? 

Or can it fly? Desperation drove the lamed and gaunt raptor to the road kill, but the bird didn’t hitch hike to get there.  And there is a universal kindness that responds with an involuntary  wheel jerk to the courage and determination of another hunter badly behind in the race for life. In my hopes the bird drags its full crop and battered being to the low side of the road and launches, listing and lurching, for a perch to rest and digest.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Grasslands at the End of WInter

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Undertaker-in-Chief


In the Grasslands of the southern Shenandoah Valley the end of winter brings a new crop of calves and a stand of grass weary of its winter burden, gnawed short and peppered with frozen Frisbees. The grasses will start to grow in a fortnight but for now the cows rely on hay unrolled in the pastures and the rodents skitter in scant cover. The calves begin to hit the ground and the raptors rake the rodents. It is a rhythm harkening to millennia of shaggier ungulates farmed with fire and eating native stands free of fescue, but otherwise not so different from the tempo of our time.  Of all the players, the raptors and rodents may have marked the changes least.

One constant is the first-calf heifers, bison then and cattle now, struggling with calves sometimes more developed than they can birth.  Without the herdsman’s vigilance the late-adolescent labor can claim both mother and young. A calf is head-locked and stillborn and the work of saving the heifer reveals that the calf would have passed the head constriction only to be hip-locked as well.  It is a life that does not happen.

Or perhaps it does.  Life throbs in the pastures of this mini-Serengheti  and little goes wasted.  Turkey Vultures cluster, solemn bishops bound by their protocol;  a pair of Common Ravens drives them off. A Bald Eagle bumps the Ravens, upending the carcass for the fresh underside, a Schwarzeneggerian dead lift of fifty pounds.  The over-boosted audio in the eagle video’s second scene includes the faint bark of a red fox.  Is it protesting the eagle? The great bird launches with a full crop and in its talons a goodly share for an incubating mate.

By day Red-Tailed Hawks pick off the exposed rodents, Harriers sweep the swales.  At dusk a roost of Short-eared Owls ghosts into the gloaming to mouse through the cows and the scampering calves that won the birthing lottery. 

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 Late Winter -- Not the Best Time To Be a Pasture Rodent