From The Brooklyn Raptor Observatory
First we heard crows. Then from overhead, a Red-tailed Hawk swooped across the street, descending to the bulkhead on the corner. There was prey in the bird’s talons: Pigeon. It might well have been captured on our roof. A couple of harrying crows followed noisily after the killer and the killed. Their caws identified them as American Crows. Fish Crows, the other local option, vocalize differently.
One of the crows landed on the same bulkhead roof as the hawk and started cawing in the raptor’s face. A flurry of snow sleeted across the scene. The stoicism of the hawk was pyrrhonistic, standing there clutching the dead or dying pigeon in one claw as the crow raged.
I am reading Katherine Rundell’s invigorating Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. I pulled my Millennium Library edition of the Complete English Poems off the shelf to co-book. Sortes virgilianae, I opened to page 105. There, the serendipitous “Thus I reclaimed my buzard love, to flye/ At what, and when, and how, and where I chuse.”
Buzard love? Footnote: “buzard; a rapacious but sluggish species of hawk; also, a blockhead.”
In Britain, Donne-land, “buzzard” is a large soaring hawk, usually Buteo buteo. These look much like the Red-tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) of North America. Both these species are in the genus Buteo, which is Latin for hawk or falcon. Buzzard is from the French busard, meaning it came into English via the Normans, mad boys for hawking and falconry. The etymology of the French word is also traced to the Latin buteo. In North America, however, buzzard has come down to us to mean vultures. These large soaring scavengers were unknown in seventeenth-century Britain, but were always ready to deal with a dead colonialist in the New World.
All this to say, sluggish? What libel is this? If this calumny against Buteo made it across the Atlantic, it hasn’t lasted. Red-tails are big, sure, but “sluggish” as a description of these pigeon-rat-squirrel hunters is absurd.
On the other wing, it took the hawk across the street nearly 90 minutes to finish breakfast. There was barely any plucking for twenty or so minutes after the crows departed. Then the feathers started to fly. Pluck, look around, pluck again. The sun had come out by then. A flurry of feathers now. Raptors, even big ones, take fairly small bites, nipping bits and pulling them away from the prey’s body. We could see the hawk’s crop swelling the chest as this food storage pouch along the esophagus filled up. This allows the bird to eat more than its stomach can handle at once.
So, roughly and hour and half after first landing, the hawk hopped over to the corner of the bulkhead roof and stropped its bill, swiping both sides over the edge of the roofline. Snicker-snack! This cleans the blood and gore away. (Bill-wiping is also seen amongst the non-raptors.) Tail cocked, the bird then squirted out a line of white excrement, flew to a nearby fire-escape, and faced the sun, as anybody would after stuffing themself.
Fifteen minutes later, a crow scouted over the remains of the pigeon, which was by then a nearly flattened scrap of feathers, still bright with blood, and one visible red foot. Several crows all of a sudden. A trio of them landed, hopping and grabbing gobs of salvage. They ate these further away on other roofs. The crows were extraordinarily wary; they retreated when I opened our window for a better photograph.
The crows didn’t take everything. The last of the squab sat there the rest of the day and overnight. There are no foxes on our rooftops. The next day around noon, more than 24 hours after the hawk’s first appearance amid the angry chorus of crows, a trio of corvids — the same? different? — descended to scavenge what remained. One or two bits were pulled away and flown off to nearby trees and roofs. Then the last piece, several inches long and with foot still attached, was picked up bodily and flown to a parapet.
Let’s wing back to that blockheaded part of that buzard footnote. (There’s a shadow of this still in “old buzzard” for an old coot.) Even a casual observer of nature knows the “dumb animal” thing is clot-pated nonsense. Red-tailed Hawks are clever enough to be a regular sight in New York City. They are a common breeder in our parks, on the occasional fire escape, and even on swanky 5th Avenue facades in the case of the legendary “Pale Male.” If they can make it here, they can make it anywhere, etc.
