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.