Inside all of us is... hope. Inside all of us is... fear. Inside all of us is... adventure. Inside all of us is a wild thing.
Maurice Sendak
Being wild
Overhead
a hawk screams
Fierce and free,
and I think how strong,
how like him
I would like to be –
Untethered by gravity,
flying into the wind -
Fearless-
until one morning
I see the young one
Just leaving the nest,
Eating scraps of meat
On the ground
while owls watch him
from the trees.
A young hawk eating some scraps of meat on the edge of the woods.
My neighbors called me when he came, so I could practice with my new lens
If he lives to be a year, his tail will turn brick red, and then he could live as long as 20 years, sometimes more.
Later that week - A mother deer and her fawn are in my yard almost every day - it breaks my heart when I see them. The mother has a broken leg (hidden behind her head in the picture), and it makes her and the fawn so impossibly vulnerable. She can’t run, and the fawn doesn’t stray far from her.
(The photos have a weird, dreamy quality because I took them through a screened window).
The fawn eating my un-mowed grass.
In the morning, before anyone else comes, it’s just me and the rabbit. While it’s still pretty dark, he eats seeds from under the bird feeder and I drink coffee. I doubt he feels the same sense of camaraderie, but I’m always glad to see him there. As soon as the first squirrels come - he’s gone.
I have need of the sky,
I have business with the grass;
I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling
Lone and high,
And the slow clouds go by.
Richard Hovey
In a lifetime where I have never even seen a single hawk on the ground in the wild - within one week - I saw two - in two different towns. Maybe there is a message there. Maybe the message is that I haven’t been paying attention and hawks are everywhere. The two in my pictures are red-tailed hawks, the first one, at the beginning, was a young fledgling who just left its nest and was hanging around in a neighbor’s yard. The second one (at the end) I saw while walking back to my car from the farm market in Saugatuck. (If you’re interested in knowing more about red-tailed hawks, click here.)
The other theme flitting around in my head this week is the vulnerability of life in the wild. All animals, but particularly the ones pictured in this post, are so close to the edge of survival. An inexperienced young hawk in an open area beneath the trees where owls live, a mother deer with a broken leg, and the fawn who needs her protection, a little rabbit who is preyed on by so many animals. I feel for them all, even as I realize that it’s just the way the natural world is. Dangerous and messy, and poignantly beautiful.
Thank you for letting me muse. See you next week.
