Not exactly news from São Paulo

It has been so long since I´ve written anything here that I am out of practice. The reason is that Heitor and I moved into a new apartment on 23 December. I will write about our misadventures later. For now I still feel too close to all of the chaos to want to talk about it. I will just say that, as of yesterday, the dining room table, which had been laying in a pile on the floor for almost a month is finally assembled. I don´t like talking on the telephone in Português, but when I got home from my class and found that the guy had been here (unscheduled, typically), and left his number I got on the phone and got him back. But, as I say, more of that later.

Now I want to tell you a little story from, I believe, the summer of 2005, when I was still living in Redlands, CA. I´ve told this to many of you and shared these pictures, but I was thinking of it today and realized again what an extraordinary event this was.

My back yard in Redlands was relatively narrow, but quite deep. I am not good at estimating distances, but I would guess that it was about 50 yards deep. At about 35 yards, there was a chain link fence enclosing a smaller area that was probably about 15 yards deep.

I arrived home from work one evening and went into the back yard to see the dogs. Soon I noticed that there was something hanging in, or on, the chain link fence 35 yards away. I walked back and was stunned to find a young hawk hanging perfectly still upside down on the back side of the fence, hanging on with his claws.

At first, I didn´t know what to do, but eventually I went back to the house and put on a leather jacket and found some leather gloves. Probably, if it hadn´t been so obviously a young bird, I wouldn´t have dared to do this. I went back to the hawk and, from the opposite side of the fence, gingerly unhooked his claws from the fence and he immediately dropped onto a large rock at the foot of the fence. It happened so fast that I have no idea how he righted himself fast enough to land on his talons. But having landed there on the rock, he didn´t move a muscle. Actually I can see from the pictures above that his head is not in the same position, but he was clearly in some kind of distress. I went back to the house and got my camera and took the two pictures which are attached here.

I think the fact that he stayed on the rock instead of flying away was my first clue that there was more of a problem than his just being tangled up in the fence. And in the process of freeing him, it was clear that he hadn´t really been tangled up inthe fence; he was just hanging onto it for dear life.

All this while the dogs are frantically trying to get at this creature. It was probably ten hours since I had left for work in the morning, and who knows how long he had been hanging in that position, while two big dogs on the other side of the fence were trying desperately to get at him the whole time. You can see the fence in one of the pictures. It is almost like there was nothing between the hawk and the dogs. It is no wonder that he was in a state of shock.

The only explanation of events that I have come up with is that he was still young, obviously, and that he had landed on the fence to wait and watch, or maybe even rest. The dogs then frightened him, maybe even nudged him, and he fell off the fence to the side away from the dogs and managed to grab on with his claws, but then was more or less trapped, constantly harassed by the dogs from the other side of the fence, and he could do nothing but hang on because he had no idea the dogs couldn´t really get to him.

Almost as soon as the hawk was on the rock, with the dogs just on the other side of the fence going crazy, I decided this wasn´t an ideal arrangement. The hawk let me lift him up off the rock and move him onto a tree stump another 15 yards further away from the dogs. Then, not knowing how long he was going to remain comatose I thought maybe it would be better to set him on the ground, and he allowed me to move him again. I put the dogs in another enclosure close to the house so that they couldn´t get anywhere near the thing.

I assumed it was too late to search and find a raptor rescure program in the area that would still be able to come out and pick this guy up so late in the day, and then I realized he may not have had anything to eat or drink for several hours. I went back to the house and filled a little dish with water and, for lack of a better idea of hawk food, I cracked open an egg and put it in a dish. When I returned with the two dishes, I don´t think he had moved a muscle. I would have liked to stay and watch him, but I also guessed that from his point of view I was as big a part of the problem as the dogs, so I left him alone and went back to the house.

I was able to stay away for maybe 30 minutes or so. When I returned he had moved to the top of the fence that separated my yard from neighbor´s. He let me approach to within six feet or so of him, and then he flew off, apparently fully recovered. The whole process had probably only lasted about 45 minutes....for me. As I say, who knows how many hours it lasted for him.

The epilog. Several months later I went back to that last 15-yard section of the yard to fill the bird feeder. Some movement in the low branches of one of the trees caught my attention, and I looked up and saw a hawk with the remains of a little bird in his talons and a few feathers flying around. I would guess he was only 12-15 feet away from me, but he never moved as I filled the bird feeder, and he was still there when I walked away. I felt bad that this hawk was using my bird feeder as bait to catch his own food, but I liked to think he was "my" hawk and that he was so serene in that tree because of some vague memories.

Ok...next time news from Brasil.

Beijos.