The draw of the hawk

Sometimes it’s the alarmed call of the magpie, sometimes a shadow racing across the grass. Other times there is no warning at all—the hawk silently appears from behind me, flying over my head.

Resisting the draw of the hawk is impossible. The first thing I do when I walk outside is look up. I’m primed to notice size and wing movements, identifying and disqualifying anything other the largest of birds, wings shaped like shark fins, the shape of its spread tail.

The hawk’s call—a high-pitched whistle that seems mis-matched to its muscular life, and its constant desire to kill—brings me running every time. It is a death call, and it makes life visceral. Every creature responds. 

Magpies head toward the threat, relying on noise and numbers to deter it and protect their home. Mice take cover, rabbits freeze, birds flee deep into trees.

Last week a hawk dived into the garden. Heavy legs and talons outstretched, it spun and pirouetted above the weeping ash, a small tree just across the lawn. Then it pulled up, beating its wings in powerful thrusts to get lift, banked sharply to the right, then the left and away.

What had it seen? I could hear the alarm call of quails and inside the tree, just out of reach of the hawk, a quail was perched. Ordinarily I can’t get close to them at all. Once I’m within 10 metres they fly high up into the taller trees. But there I stood, inside the arms of the weeping ash, directly under a quail. I watched the quick rise and fall of its chest. The threat of the hawk from above was greater than the threat of a human from below. In the circle of life, in the food chain of my garden, the hawk is all powerful.

We are a few missed meals away from our animal nature. Surrounded by comfort and immediacy, cushioned from hardship, our fragility is disguised. We forget what it means to be alive, and what it takes to stay that way.

It’s easy to feel like observers or, at best, protectors of the natural world, but that is simply a function of the distance we put between ourselves and it. We are flesh and blood, animal, part of the eco-system. We might live in a way that keeps up separate—clothing shields our bodies, moving in vehicles that speed us through the landscape, living in houses that shut out the air, temperature and the living, shifting world around us—but we are not separate.

This is why the hawk so beguiling. It is a wild in my domestic life. Amongst all the tidiness and comfort it reminds me that hunt and be hunted is part of who we are. It is only size that keeps me off the hawk’s radar. What a different life I’d have with winged fear flying over me every day, each passing shadow sending me for cover.

The hawk symbolises the hunt, the relentless pull to survive, the single-minded purpose of staying alive. When our basic needs are met, what drives us? What is wild in us still? 

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