The Season of the Raptors
RICHARD BOWES
1
One recent summer, Greenwich Village fell in love with carnivorous fledglings. Beloved birds of prey in the heart of New York seemed ironic. I pointed it out to friends as a suitable metaphor for a town with a sentimental side and a savage side.
Then on a morning early in June, a red-tailed hawk alighted on a ledge outside the back windows of my apartment, and things started to get personal. Behind my building is a forgotten New York: a tangle of alleys, second-story patios, and tough survivor trees. All was silence out back and I was sure the pigeons, the sparrows, the pair of mourning doves who nested there had either fled or were as still as stones.
The hawk looked over the side of the ledge. Sparrows were too small to interest him and I didn’t care if he made off with a pigeon. But I worried that he might find the doves. Their forlorn cooing was like something out of another time and place. And I would miss that sound in the mornings.
I knew the visiting red-tail was male because of the color of his plumage. And I believed that he was the mate of the hawk, which famously nested over on Washington Square.
There wasn’t a camera handy. As I studied him, he studied me: first with his right eye, then with both eyes. He moved his head to get a few more views of my face—like a photographer looking for the perfect shot. He swiveled his head 180 degrees; gave me one last look and took off. The visit evoked memories I’d managed to forget.
He and his mate raised their young on the very ample windowsill of the president of New York University. The president himself had more than a touch of the raptor about him and he welcomed the red-tails like they were relatives. A camera called “The Hawk Cam” was set up on the window ledge twelve stories above the trees and fountain of Washington Square Park.
Any time you wanted to know what the hawk kids were up to you could watch them. Often you saw nothing but still forms, downy or feathered. Other times you might see the mother, with her fierce beak and murderous eyes, shove bits of fresh rat down her children’s gullets.
2
I worked at an information desk in the university library. Greenwich Village with its old buildings, underground streams, and centuries as a port for ships from around the world, has a lively rat population. We always got questions about the rats of New York. The hawks and the camera meant we began to get questions about birds eating rodents.
One patron, scruffy and middle aged, wanted to know how the hawks caught live rats in the middle of the day when humans so rarely saw them by daylight. I’d wondered the same thing and trotted out what information we had. But none of it was what he was looking for. Then, as bothersome patrons so often do, he revealed what was actually on his mind. “It’s fresh meat. Nothing from factories! Right here in the city,” he said, seeming almost dreamy.
I showed him a list of rat-borne diseases and found he didn’t want to know. The next day he appeared with a newspaper article. It seemed that fans of the nestling hawks had persuaded City Pest Control to stop putting down rat poison in the park. They feared the eyas, as baby hawks are called, would die from eating poison.
The guy went away with a look of what seemed to me an unhealthy satisfaction. I found myself thinking about the public’s fascination with the lives of birds of prey.
Even before the nestlings, hawks had been around Washington Square Park off and on for quite a while. One sunny afternoon a couple of years before, I was walking through the park on my way back from lunch when I saw a crowd. It was maybe two hundred people, lots of them tourists, but plenty of students and local residents. They stared up silently and watched a hawk in the branches of an old tree tear into a squirrel with its claws and beak.
That hawk and others seemed to like an audience. I had once seen one stand on the back of a park bench as she stared with unblinking eyes at a terrified squirrel just barely hidden behind a small bush. She did this with people not that far behind her, like she knew we all had her back.
3
Things like that were on my mind early one morning a week or two after the hawk’s first appearance at my window. I went to my desk and there he was on the ledge outside the window. I was sure it was the same one. He was utterly motionless and staring at something farther down the back alley.
My camera was on the desk and I picked it up. Maybe I was too sudden. The bird swiveled his eyes and beak in my direction, looked me in the face, spread his wings, rose up, and disappeared before I could take a shot.
I was surprised by my own regret at a missed photo opportunity and how I was becoming engrossed with hawks.
But the full shock of recognition came when I decided to put on the mask. It was on one of my bookshelves, the souvenir of an interactive play I’d attended. In one scene we in the audience put on carnival masks and cavorted in a noir Renaissance Venice.
This one wasn’t a full-face, Phantom of the Opera model. But it was larger and far more ornate than a mere Lone Ranger–type mask. I donned it and found myself looking from the mirror to the window through slots set in a black and silver feathered face.
It was like I expected the hawk to come back and be taken by the mere sight of me. That didn’t happen. But I did snap photos of myself in the mask and put them up on Facebook. For a day or two, it amused online friends who were bored by their jobs.
A couple of old acquaintances sent me joking, “Are you all right?” emails. I assured them that I was.
What bothered me a bit was that beneath the joke, I was actually disappointed that I couldn’t entice the hawk back; let him know he was among friends. This was not an eccentricity I wanted to think about.
In late summer on the Hawk Cam, the red-tail fledglings sat on their windowsill and stared at the nooks and crannies in the neighboring buildings and at tourists feeding pigeons and squirrels amid the trees and flower beds across the street in Washington Square Park.
They began to make short gliding hops to other windowsills and to the branches of trees. When that happened, the parents stopped feeding them.
One day, the older one flew off, a few days later the younger did the same. The parents were no longer around the windowsill. When, after a week or two, none of them had reappeared, the Hawk Cam was turned off and that episode of the raptors in Washington Square seemed to be over.
Right around then I had a jumbled dream of childhood, which featured the Atlantic Ocean, large birds that talked to me, and cousins of mine about whom I hadn’t thought in years.
Waking up, I remembered snatches of the dream and matched them to my memory of a train trip from Boston out to Cape Cod that my parents and I had taken when I was six years old.
This was where my father’s family came from. I remember an aunt and uncle greeting us. My two boy cousins, Neil and Frankie, eleven and eight, in faded jeans and nothing more, stared at me in shirt and tie and shorts and shoes like they couldn’t believe it.
They were bigger and older. Neil seemed halfway to adulthood and was fascinating and scary.
Maybe the second day of the visit I was out with my cousins in their tiny sailboat, which had a mast but no sails. The sun was mostly behind clouds; the light was silver with a touch of gold.
We all wore swimming trunks and paddled with oars.
Looking around I saw we were beyond sight of land. I’d heard their father tell them not to do that. I was uneasy and noticed both of them but especially Neil, smiling like they’d gotten away with something. I wanted to go back but didn’t dare to say anything. Neil looked at me like he knew just what was going on in my head and was amused.
As we paddled, out of nowhere, a gull alighted on the mast. Neil nodded and said, “That’s our guide. They always look toward land.”
The gull’s eyes were sharp. They reminded me of the pirate parrot’s eyes in the movie Treasure Island. I looked away and the bird suddenly screeched. Turning, I saw it trying to fly away from where it had roosted. A huge bird, an eagle as I found out, was on the gull with talons planted in its back. The gull, screaming, tried to wrench free.
The eagle tore off the head, ripped apart the flapping wings, and flew off with the twitching remains. I cried and almost pissed myself. My cousins were wide-eyed. But Neil said, “He’ll lead us home.” We followed the eagle with the dead gull in its claws and in a few minutes I saw land.
They laughed at my tears. Neil looked down at me and said, “You got to raise your right hand and promise before God not to tell anyone how far out we went. Break your word and you go to hell!”
And because he wasn’t bothered by the birds and the blood and because I was terrified, I raised my hand and promised.
“And you don’t tell anyone,” he said, “about what happened to the gull. Or the same thing will happen to you.” I nodded, and at that moment he was a big and scary as the eagle.
The adults were all in a bad mood when we showed up. I think my parents and I left the next day. I never saw any of that family again. Except maybe Neil some years later.
4
“I forgot about the seagull and the eagle until years after it happened,” I said. I’d just described the boat trip to my best friend Lois. We go way back to college. She was in New York on a short visit and I amazed her by talking about birds of prey.
“The first time I thought about those birds again was when I was in my teens in Boston,” I told her. “There was this guy who dealt meth and who liked to go after kids. So he was called Super Chicken Hawk.
“He had his lair in this old apartment building over near the Charles River. It had large windows looking out on the water. And stuck right inside the apartment nailed onto one of the window frames was this big old iron birdcage. It had a little, narrow entrance drilled in the windowsill, so small birds could get in from the outside but not large ones. He had finches building nests and singing in his living room, which was nice but creepy.
“The trick with this guy was getting him to sell you the speed without letting him get into your pants. He was weird enough that after a couple of visits I stayed away for maybe a year. When I went back there were some older guys, even a woman, people in their twenties, maybe thirties, standing around, looking whacked out and amused.
“There was a much different birdcage, large enough to hold a crouching person, and there was a bare-ass kid inside it. He had to scrunch down because of these big wings he was wearing. He kept his face turned away so I couldn’t really see him. But what he reminded me of, the way he held himself, was my cousin Neil, who I hadn’t seen since the boat trip. The chilling coincidence was that a gull was hanging in the air outside, looking in at us.
“When I tried to get a closer look, Neil, if that’s who it was, raised his shoulders so that the wings covered his face. He didn’t want me to see that but didn’t seem to care other if people in the room looked. That made me double down on the idea he knew me and I knew him.
“The dealer/hawk was all over me. Sold me the speed but said, ‘Next time I want you in the cage,’ and the people liked that.
“It was a long time before I went back and when I did, it was all gone. The downstairs door was wide open and I could hear drilling and hammering somewhere in the building. Then I found the door of Super Chicken Hawk’s apartment hanging on its hinges. It was empty. The window that had the cage was broken. The only trace of anything that had once gone on there was some feathers on the floor.”