I'm Watching You Like a Hawk

My semi-feral cats were really desolating the wildlife in my garden. So, by blocking off the pet-door, I’ve been keeping the cats inside the house during the daytime while birds and squirrels are scavengering and vulnerable. Then I unblock the pet-door at night so the cats can still exercise their feral natures – and incidentally help keep the neighborhood clear of rodents.

Although frankly, I feel just about as sad about a rodent falling prey as I do about a bird or squirrel. I have seen compelling instances of bravery, altruism, and intelligence on the part of rats and mice and I came close to joining the “Rat Fanciers Society” once. But I have to yield to community opinion that rodents can create unique health hazards and can overrun a neighborhood if not checked by chemical means or by roving colonies of feral cats. I hear there is now a waiting list of neighborhoods in Chicago that have put in bids to have feral cat colonies relocated onto their blocks for purposes of rat patrol.

But this new routine I have of keeping the cats indoors during the day and letting them out at night has been a good compromise – except, it has been grueling for me. I have to get up just at dawn and corral the cats. They come in to be fed, but then caterwaul when they find they can’t get outside again. It’s a chorus of crescendoing caterwauls. So it’s hard for me to get back to sleep. Usually I don’t even try. I straggle blearily through a few chores until the cats accept their enclosure and settle down for the day. Then I can take a nap. At dusk I let them out again. I’m looking forward to winter when dawn comes later and when I’ll be able to sleep later.

Even though this routine has been rough on me, it has paid off. The variety of birds who have come back to feed at my birdfeeders and flowers has increased enormously. What’s more, I haven’t had the heartbreak of tripping over the corpses of squirrels I befriended whenever I walk through the garden. Nor have I seen any more squirrels making their way piteously, through what would surely prove to be very brief lives, on three legs and one bloody, hanging stump. My yard has become the kind of haven it was before the advent of the cats.

This proliferation of wildlife in my yard has in turn helped draw a family of four Cooper’s hawks into the area. These birds are of course also top-of-the-food-chain predators, but they haven’t been doing nearly the wanton damage my cats did, and the presence of the hawks itself contributes to the diversity of my garden’s ecosystem. I’ve been surprised at the restraint the hawks have shown when it comes to predation. During all the weeks they have been frequenting the high branches of my trees, I have only seen one pigeon fall victim. For the most part, the hawks seem to be making a living posing for all the neighborhood shutterbugs that their majestic presence has drawn out.

However, I’ve witnessed some heart-stoppingly close calls. One of those squirrels that my new routine had undoubtedly saved from the cats – seemed on the verge of falling prey to the hawks. I stood looking on in fear and trepidation as the squirrel scampered up the maple tree where a hawk was perched and unbelievably approached the hawk, tapping it on the talons, and then looking up at it as if inviting it to play! When I told an acquaintance about this bizarre bravado, he took it as a commonplace. He told me that squirrels often like to befriend pigeons and this squirrel must have thought he’d found the King of Pigeons. Well, I don’t know. I had never seen squirrels soliciting the companionship of pigeons. But my friend said it was so.

However, the scene grew more threatening still. The squirrel continued to try to engage the hawk in fellowship, looking up appealingly at it, when a second hawk flew in out of the blue and perched on the other side of the squirrel. The squirrel looked from one to the other, still in an attitude of having found a gang it might like to join. My friend, maintaining his whimsical, children’s-book view of the interaction, projected a likely ingratiating dialogue for the squirrel. “Hey, you are two big, strong pigeons! You guys must be from the South Side. Haha.”

But as the two hawks closed in on the squirrel, beetling down on it – it became clear that the squirrel was having second thoughts about engaging them. Continuing to project a train of thought for the squirrel, I believed I could see it re-thinking its enthusiasm. “Well, haha, I can see you guys don’t have time to play right now. Ahem, come to think of it, I have an appointment. I have to be – somewhere else. I really should be going. See ya…”

The squirrel high-tailed it off farther up the branch. It looked back at the hawks as they craned menacingly after it, still not attacking. Then after that one backward glance, the squirrel clambered up and away – amazingly safe.

I wasn’t able to get a picture of that moment when the squirrel stood hemmed in by the two hawks as they bent down in increasingly intense inspection of it. But I got my camera in time to catch a picture as the squirrel looked back at where it had been, and the two hawks flapped a fierce “Good riddance” after it. I have included that picture here. It is hard to see the squirrel who is way off to the left of the picture. You can just make out its pointy ears and its one foreleg braced over an intervening branch.

The other pictures I’ve included are all of the largest of the hawks, posing in lone magnificence. I made a copy of the picture I took of the hawk standing on a neighbor’s tree stump. I had the picture framed and presented it to my neighbor before I realized that everyone in the neighborhood was snapping pictures and that there was a glut of these nature studies all up and down the street. I also snapped a close-up of the hawk’s head on the day it did catch a pigeon. There’s a small pigeon feather visible in the hawk’s beak.

Finally, I took close-up pictures of the hawk’s talons as it perched on the edge of my building gutter. Occasionally, the hawk would flex its claws, in the way an arthritic person might clench and unclench his hand when he first gets out of bed in the morning, in order to get things moving again. So there’s a picture of the hawk’s talons straight – and then a picture of the clenched clump the hawk made as it exercised them.

That neighbor to whom I gave a framed picture runs a tattoo parlor. I also gave him copies of the close-up pictures of the hawk’s talons. I thought he could design a good tattoo using them as reference. Perhaps we can start our own gang – The Talons. What an intimidating name! But instead of being a “gangsta” gang – we could be a gang for the good of the neighborhood. We could menace all the human rats into cleaning up their act.