Neighborhood Hawks: A Year Following Wild Birds

By John Lane and Helen Correll

After reading J. A. Baker’s fifty-year-old British nature classic The Peregrine, John Lane found himself an ocean away, stalking resident red-shouldered hawks in his neighborhood in Spartanburg, South Carolina. What he observed was very different from what Baker deduced from a decade of chronicling the lives of those brooding migratory raptors. Baker imagined a species on the brink of extinction because of the use of agricultural chemicals on European farms. A half century later in America, Lane found the red-shouldered hawks to be a stable Anthropocene species adapted to life along the waterways of a suburban nation.

Lane watched the hawks for a full year and along the way made a pledge to himself: Anytime he heard or saw the noisy, nonmigratory hawks in his neighborhood, he would drop whatever he was doing and follow them on foot, on bike, or in his truck. The almanac that results from this discipline considers many questions any practiced amateur naturalist would ask, such as where and when will the hawks nest, what do they eat, what are their greatest threats, and what exactly are they communicating through those constant multinoted cries? Lane’s year following the hawks also led him to try to answer what would become the most complex question of all: why his heart, like Baker’s, goes out so fully to wild things.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780820354941

John Lane

JOHN LANE is professor emeritus of environmental studies at Wofford College. A 2014 inductee into the South Carolina Academy of Authors, his books include Circling Home, My Paddle to the Sea, and Coyote Settles the South (all Georgia). He is also coeditor of The Woods Stretched for Miles: New Nature Writing from the South (also Georgia), and he has published numerous volumes of poetry, essays, and novels. Coming into Animal Presence is his most recent work. He lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

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The Almanac

since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things.

—E. E. CUMMINGS

Summer

30 June. Our drought deepens weekly, persistent since March. The air smells parched. The privet is dead in the bottoms. I water the yard plants every other day. Gray squirrels have started to strip the coleus. Returning from the farmers market yesterday, I dropped a peach in the driveway. Something found it overnight, ate half, and then abandoned what remained in the defeated ferns. The deer eat yard plants they haven’t touched in fourteen years. This morning for the first time I heard the whirring of the cicadas, like the motor of summer finally turned over. First they buzzed to my left, then to the right, strung together by the constant murmuring of a Carolina wren between. As morning hinges into afternoon, following a quick thunderstorm, a hawk bathes in a rain puddle on asphalt at the subdivision front gate.

1 July. These red-shouldered hawks are the size of a quart-sized carton of milk, with a long tail and broad wings almost checkerboarded with white and brown, set against their reddish, compact bodies. In size they are halfway between a sparrow hawk and a red-tailed hawk, both birds I have seen in the neighborhood.

The field guides say of telling the sexes apart, forget it. But one of our birds is larger, sounds more hoarse than the other. Is that a way to tell them apart? Or is it that both birds get hoarse because they call so much? One of our neighbors down the street says she hates these birds because of their calling. She has a free-ranging Yorkie and lives in fear those damn hawks will snatch the little dog. The birds are vocal; the various sounds they make have been described as peeping in nestlings, trending into chirps as they grow older. There are six recognized calls among the adults and I’ve heard them all: the common kee-aah, with the accent on the first syllable, a stretched-out second syllable with a downward bounce, sometimes repeated a dozen times; kee-wee, a variation on the first; kip, used in alarm; kee-yip, heard when they are excited; kee-ann-errr, when adults are courting; and finally the soft and brief kee, used sometimes by the female when brooding. Some guides refer to the birds’ courtship cries as wild songs. If they are singers, then they are making music all the time. We live within the home range of the red-shouldered hawks, and their vocalizations are as regular as our favorite radio station. Their bird cries echo through the nearby wooded spaces throughout the daylight hours. Sound becomes destiny.

3 July. Cool morning air. A hawk calls to the east. Keeyer, kee-yer, kee-yer, the vocalization is extraverted and edgy, a calling card, mixed (as they are mixed in) with the mechanical drone of a passing plane, the whistle of titmice at the feeding tube, cardinals canvasing, a nervous Carolina wren, and a nuthatch in the yaupon holly. Through it all, a hawk’s cry, rasping the sky like a file.

4 July. One of the hawks swoops from a sentinel perch on the low branch of a box elder, then slashes across the suburb entrance in front of my moving truck. It cruises in low just as I turn the corner and then squats on the ground in the grass next to the kudzu trimline. The bird sits there with wings hooded, as if some prey is hidden underneath. I slow and then stop the truck. The hawk hops once on the grass, squares up, shows me the warm, burnished chest bars of its vestments, looks at me straight on, and then bolts toward the windscreen. At the last moment it jacks both buteo wings into blunt scissor blades and veers away. Then the hawk brakes low to land on the same limb it had originally taken off from. When I accelerate again the hawk rouses its feathers like a dismissal before settling hard on the limb and picking up each yellow leg, one by one.

Later in the afternoon I hear not one but two red-shouldereds together, kee-youing in the wooded vacant lots to the north. The temperature has reached ninety-five. They are either bickering or belaboring a contested point, like the habituated husband and wife they are. Their voices are stringent, metallic, looped through the suburban trees like pulled wire. They call a hundred times.

5 July. Where are their habitual neighborhood perches? Only long and sustained attention will reveal these. I watch the sky, but these hawks are rarely soaring. So instead I watch the ground for patches bleached white with hawk void. I’m hoping that the sites of their perches will help me find their nest later in the year.

As I think about hawks and humans, I consider the term neighbor. It’s a slippery word, its origins submerged in Old English, neah, or near, combined with gebur, or dweller. Near dwellers. Neighbors—you expect things from them. It’s one of the building-block relationships of human community. Humans have had neighbors since the dawn of our species. Even caves must have been a sense of ordered space.

Neighborhood adds in another ancient etymological element, that of the suffix -hood, a little more recent, from the Middle English, and suggesting a condition, a state, a nature, opening up all sorts of room in the mind of a poet for metaphoric collision of other species in a place.

Searching for differing and elastic meanings of neighbor and neighborhood, in my reading I discovered commensalism, the biological idea that individuals of different species can have a relationship in which one species obtains food or other benefits without either harming or benefiting the other. It’s easy to see the commensal birds benefiting from my bird feeder. But it’s hard—and maybe downright impossible—to know for sure what food or commensal benefits a hawk gets from intersecting with my backyard.

But maybe these neighborhood hawks can be considered commensal with us humans. Do I receive commensal benefits from them? How about the daily material for my observations and speculations?

7 July. I stare out at the floodplain as if it’s a riddle that can be solved. Where are the hawks? Do they joust with today’s wind? Red-shouldered hawks live mostly in the cluttered world of the forest understory. Or at least the woods look cluttered to these human eyes. The hawks tilt and careen through low limbs and brush jumbles. They dive and slice through the parallel planes of wood, foliage, and air. The woodland patterns are there to be exploited—the predictable spread of oak and popular limb swirls, the shapes imprinted on closed space the hawks navigate.

What a hawk sees is dense piedmont forest in every direction, and from above. Our house is hidden, April to November, under parasols of broad photosynthesizing leaves. The pinching edge of these remaining woods enclose our subdivision. These hawks, unlike Baker’s peregrines, don’t migrate. They stay around and learn the familiar warrens of our wooded yard; they tilt through intimate suburban forests. They settle down on predictable parallel perches. They live in a world of endless seasonal change and project the steady calculation of a predator out to the edges of their home ranges.

8 July. One of the hawks is a silhouette against the cerulean dawn sky washed clean by last night’s storms. It’s a perfect cross, what the field guide describes as the buteo shape (broad, rounded wings; short tail), but the glimpse lasts only five seconds. The hawk passes with such assurance, close enough for clarity. Then it’s over the bottoms along the creek, calling among the morning crows.

Then through the oaks another hawk rises up and lands on a large oak, the first hawk still calling near the creek. Farther down in the branches the titmice bicker. Above, the hawks string the sharper, longer notes of their vocation against the rising day.

9 July. I should get off this glider and go look for the source of the hawk calls before the heat rises. But there are so many birds in the yard’s soundscape that are not hawks—a wild turkey clucking to the south in the bottoms, cardinals in almost every cardinal direction, titmice at the feeder, crows offended by something north of here. Suddenly, breaking from the southern woods, a hawk crosses low over the house and sutures the morning’s tapestry again like a needle.

There are four new arrivals in the yard. These crows don’t yet know I am watching. Like four black holes appearing in the garden, they strut back and forth, then dip, one by one, in the birdbath, their bills slightly ajar in the heat.

10 July. When is chick time? April? May? If they have chicks next year, I want to see them fledge and fly. If I find the nest.

11 July. The heat is the still story. It lays thick on the woodlands like a tin sheet. Scalded weeds shrivel in the paths. The oak leaf hydrangeas droop. A defeated gray squirrel stretches out prone, spread-eagle on the deck boards in a hood of shade. How does such dry and hot weather (weeks now without significant rain) affect the resident hawks, the successful denizens of wet bottomlands since the Oligocene?

As if to answer my question, at high noon one of the two hawks flies through the branches lower in the bottoms—noisy, fretful, but by no means defeated by the drought.

I grab my binoculars and take off down the dry trail into the woods in the general direction the hawk disappeared. I wander from shade spot to shade spot. Down on the creek the current has dwindled to a whisper, but soon the shadows fling a kingfisher downstream, arrowing past with surprising, harrowing laughter, wings folded, another adapted predator of this creek valley.

I hear a hawk a long way off, somewhere north of the cul-de-sac. Then it circles back my way. I cut through the woods toward it, to pursue this conversation in the heat. As I bushwhack, it calls. It’s in the northeast quadrant, beside the neighborhood’s dead-end crooked finger of road. Both hawks or one? I can’t tell from this distance. Then I figure out it’s only one, and I follow the single bird’s call up from the creek to the hardwoods in the subdivision’s heart, and locate the constant caller sitting high in an alligator-barked sourwood. The red-shouldered flies as I approach, then goes silent somewhere out of sight to the east. No calls deeper in the woods. Is the nest back there? Worth the effort to pursue? Maybe on a cooler day. I head home. Thunder to the southwest. The rising heat has spawned a storm. The titmice are the only sound in the dry woods, save for a neighbor’s air conditioner.

12 July. A day without hawks. The forest is stripped of some vital layer. Where do they go on a day off like this? The only birdsong is a single crow southwest of here. I know the hawks can appear at any moment, though, and burst the settled afternoon like a dart with their cries.

Today there are only hawks in my imagination. I look up into the crotch of every tall oak. There? There? There? I want to find their nest so much I create one in every tree out of squirrel nests.

13 July. One of the birds is back. Six-thirty a.m. and I hear three sharp kwees south in the floodplain. That’s it. Then it’s gone. Haiku birding.

14 July. I watch a yellow-billed cuckoo drop from a low branch onto a caterpillar in our cul-de-sac, carry it back to the branch, eat it, and then wipe its long beak before tiring of my vigil and flying away. At the same time, a downy woodpecker in black and white vestments works the trunk of an old dogwood in the