Red Tailed Hawk Feather 1994

After a few months of hard work moving into the new digs more time opened up to explore the ten acres we were to be stewards of. On either side of us and across the road all the properties were ten acres and more. Behind us lay thousands of acres of Crown Land leased to farmers as range land. After thoroughly exploring the local environs it was time to check into the hinterlands…the lovely unknown.

Going for walks was usually a parade of people and cats. Where children would walk the road, the cats preferred to walk the woods and so cats were my companions on this occasion. Tuxedo, a black and white eight year old male who looked for all the world to be wearing a…you guessed it… a tuxedo, and Kiness, a nine year old longhaired high strung coon cat expected me to move slowly. Many jaunts in the past had set up our protocols for walking together. If I moved to far ahead of them one or the other or both cats would begin caterwauling at me to wait up.

All spring we had been watching the mating dance and listening to the conversations of a pair of Red Tailed Hawks. Their distinct screes were music in my ears as I worked to break a vegetable garden out of the sod and always reason to stop and search for them in the beauty blue skies of the Fraser Plateau. It was evident that a pair of Hawks had a nest up the slope behind us on the Crown Land. Finding that nest became a good reason to start up the slope.

Once we’d passed the edges of our land we seemed to step into another time. It was obvious that cattle wandered through but occasionally as there was no fresh dung. There were no paths but the wanderings of cattle that lead nowhere. We picked our way through the grass, light underbrush and mostly pine scrub trees, with the cats taking their own paths that led from one look out, mostly stumps, to another. It was a steady up hill pull with enough heat in the spring sun to bring a bead of sweat to my brow and dissonant Siamese sounding complaints from the cats that I stay in sight.

The higher we moved up the hill, the steeper the slope became until we left the grass behind and now moved over shale through an old unlogged section of the forest. We were accompanied by the screes of the hawks intermittently as we’d climbed. About the same moment as I spotted the nest a couple of thousand feet across the shale, I also heard the note of the hawks screes change from business as usual to screes of distress. My determination to reach the bottom of their nesting tree to look for feathers and debris from their feeding was now being infringed on by the company I was keeping. If I had been traveling alone I may have been enough to set them on edge, but two domestic cats were out of the range of possibility.

As I stood to catch my breath, take in the view and reflect on the situation it came to me that I couldn’t interrupt the hawks…they were busy feeding their young and needed all their energies to do so. A human being with nothing better to do than disturb them for a bit of entertainment was what I was about to become if I didn’t back off. With no disappointment I turned my back and headed downhill knowing that I’d have many more opportunities to touch base with red hawk energy.

The increasing daylight of a late Northern spring makes observing every spring evening by following the change of light from dusk to dark ever magical. A couple of evenings after our hike to the hawk’s nest the smell of just mown lawns were the lure to tour the property and admire the days work. A patch of brilliant sunshine on the farthest edge of freshly mown green drew my footsteps and spirit. There in a spotlight of evening sun lay the pristine Red tailed Hawk tail feather I had day dreamed I would find.