Dark specks clustered the distant sky.
The young bird came in a box. Someone found it, assumed it was abandoned, caught it and brought it to me. I was in sixth grade but had earned a reputation as a person who could care for baby animals, especially birds.
The specks swirled in a graceful but random motion.
Back then, the bird was called a “sparrow hawk.” Two decades later, American ornithologists finally got around to acknowledging that a bird in the falcon family shouldn’t be called a “hawk” because hawks and falcons really are biologically different; they renamed it “American kestrel.”
The number of specks grew and what had been a cluster became a small cloud.
I fed it, gave it water, sheltered it at night and in a couple weeks set it free to fend for itself, an action its real parents would have done.
The random motion slowly but uniformly transformed into an elegant spiral.
Such encounters nourished my interest in wildlife and encouraged a pursuit of knowing them. What lives out there? Where do they live? How do they live? How are they the same? How are they different? What do I need to do to find them?
The specks, already small, shrank even smaller as their spiraling gently carried them up.
I bought my own bird books and borrowed every library book written by John Burroughs, Edwin Way Teale and Rachel Carson. In college I learned of Maurice Broun’s book, “Hawks Aloft.” I read it through, started to read another book then a second other book but stopped reading them both to read about the hawks one more time.
The specks reached an altitude that suited them and the topmost birds departed.
“Hawks Aloft” explained the cultural tradition of shooting hawks as a leisure-time recreational pursuit. And Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania became famous as the place where drawing the line and saying, “No more slaughtering!” shut down that indefensible culture.
Cloudlike, the specks slowly moved south, riding the air like surfers riding a wave.
I had already been to Baja to engage migrating gray whales and had visited the San Luis Valley several times to witness the sandhill crane migration. Now, reading about extraordinary hawk migrations, a new spiritual orientation began to redirect the course of my life.
As they came closer, the specks transformed first into birds then into hawks.
Whereas some people travel the world to see museums and palaces, towers and bridges, expansive cities and sports fields, I became charged with the desire to see wildlife, Life on Earth, and the spectacles that occur in their pursuits of survival.
They were mostly soaring hawks with only a few falcons and no eagles.
And so, I made plans with a friend. Two weeks ago, leaving at 3:30 in the morning, we drove 17 hours to Corpus Christi, Texas, where great numbers of hawks pass by as they migrate south to overwinter in South America.
Gradually but steadily the hawks approached.
The next day, we rose early and went to Hazel Bazemore County Park and stood on the hawk-watch platform. Professional counters were there and tallied every hawk swarm.
In minutes a single swarm of 7,460 broad-winged hawks passed by.
I didn’t go there to see the hawks; I went to witness the spectacle. And the hawks rewarded my effort by making me a much richer man.
