Payback

Sometime during the night a deer died in the marsh. By morning, only the rib cage remained above the surface in the shallows. A flock of crows were sitting in attendance and picking scraps from the bones, somber black feathers appropriate to the wake.

If you had to pick an all-purpose bird, it would be a crow. Feeding on anything more or less biodegradable, the American crow lives anywhere from the edges of the high Arctic to the edge of the South American rainforest. Social birds, crows form huge winter roosts which act much the same as singles’ bars where unattached birds pair up, usually for life. The young from the previous year stay around the nest, helping the parents raise the new brood, and acting as babysitters and gaining experience. Crows flap their wings fairly slowly, seemingly rowing their way across the sky. Highly maneuverable, crows will stay just out of harm’s way when harassing large hawks, seemingly just for the sport. The hawk eventually tires of being bullied and flies off to another, quieter perch. At least until a crow finds it.
Crows meet their match, however, in the ring-billed gull. Medium-size, for gulls, ring-bills are true masters of their medium. They can soar like vultures on their narrow wings and dive on fish and other prey like hawks, loosing airspeed by flipping over in midair, spilling wind from their wings. Gulls are consummate scavengers and thieves, living their wits and going by the motto: “You find it; I’ll help you eat it.”

Woes betide any crow that has picked a tasty morsel from the aforementioned deer carcass and attempts to fly off in hopes of a snack. Gulls are on it in a screaming, milling mob. In a few seconds, the mob reduces to one or two gulls, shadowing the crow’s every move. What follows can best be described as a mixture of aerial ballet and back-alley mugging.

The crow swoops low to the water, eliminating attack from below. The gull puts on a burst of speed, bringing it to within reach of the crow’s tail feathers which get yanked.

The crow veers left and right, with the gull mirroring every move in hot pursuit. The crow climbs to escape but the gull is better at it and follows at a closing angle. The exhausted crow finally drops the morsel the gull casually snags it out the air and leaves the scene followed in turn by a new set of pursuers.

The gull climbs steeply, does a wing-over to allow most of the flock to pass it, and drops the tidbit. The morsel, by this time just a toy, is passed in midair from gull to gull, until somebody finally eats it. You can almost hear the gull say to the poor crow, “That’s how you do it, Jack.”

The flock settles to the surface until another hapless crow launches into the air with a bit of venison in its beak. You get the feeling the gulls chase crows to distraction because they can and are having a grand old time doing it.

Winter Hawks

Winter has settled in with snow and a week’s worth of below freezing temperatures. The marsh is pretty well locked in ice. The ducks have deserted, moving to the nearby Potomac where the current keeps the water flowing. A flock of ring-billed gulls crowd the only patch of open water, a few crows and a single family of geese hovering on the ice at the edges. A lone snipe circles the marsh, looking for unfrozen mud to forage for small invertebrates

Sparrows work the fast land, gleaning seeds and bits of whatever they can find. Song and white-throated sparrows scratch at the dead leaf cover like tiny barnyard fowl while swamp sparrows, true winter residents, flit through the brown and brittle cattail stalks. A downy woodpecker works its way up a cattail, looking for telltale holes made by larval insects now chilled and sleeping in the heart of the dead brown cane.



Hawks are out today, cold weather seems to their liking. One of the resident red-shouldered pair perches on a dead limb, surveying the frozen marsh, watching for any flicker of movement that might betray a mouse or vole. Motionless as a museum specimen, it follows my movement in its direction, flying off before I get within decent camera range.

Farther in the woods, I flush an adult female red-tail hawk from the ground. She lumbers into the low branches, the furry bundle of a former squirrel clenched in a talon. She perches and finishes her lunch, feathers gleaming and copper tail tucked. Red-tails are the utility infielders of the hawk clan—big enough to take anything from mice to rabbits, and fast and agile enough to get by. They are at home everywhere from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. One of the things I like about red-tails is that when you are close enough to really look at them, they always look back, yellow eyes bright as gold doubloons. Prey animals don’t seem to notice you—when they know they have been seen, they glance about in all directions doubtlessly calculating escape trajectories and factoring in all the variables. Predators like red-tails tend to look you in the eye in recognition of a fellow apex predator—top of the food chain, Ma. Then they go about their business, which in this case was polishing off lunch.

The red-tail female’s crop bulges and she casually flies off, leaving the skin of her prey draped over the branch. If she were truly hungry, she would leave nothing. Her round crop and the leftovers tell me she is “fed up” and looking for a quiet place for digestion and contemplation.

Near the parking lot, yet another hawk perches on a low oak branch close to the trunk. This one is an immature Cooper’s hawk as evidenced by the red irises (adults have yellow eyes). Coopers hawks used to be fairly rare this far south but have discovered bird feeders and will hang about all winter, picking off the unwary, the slow, or the just plain unlucky. Populations have blossomed to where every neighborhood has a Coop or two in residence.

The wind gusts through the trees, branches rattle, no human sounds are in evidence. I could be walking through a forest on the edge of the tundra thousands of years ago where glaciers loom in the distance and the ancient rhythms pulse.