Return of the Hawks

It must have been ten years ago. It was a beautiful winter afternoon, bright warm sun, sky the shade of blue I have never seen anywhere outside Calgary; dripping water from the snow-laden trees which would form brilliant icicles the next morning. I tried to move my cat to the deck to laze in the sun but it resisted. Several fat squirrels were rushing around the yard having fun and the cat did not feel safe with those boisterous critters around. It upset me that my own pet, a legitimate resident of our home, was too scared to enjoy the glorious sunshine and I decided to do something about it. I fired a letter to the local newspaper demanding that the city controlled the furry pests who had taken over our neighbourhood. The editor obligingly published it a couple of days later.

To tell you the truth, I did not expect a response from the pest control department and was not disappointed when I did not receive any. The newspaper did get at least one irate letter which they published a few days later to show their broadmindedness. The letter took me to task for hating the squirrels, may be plump and scary in my prosperous neighbourhood but slim, dainty and no threat to her cat in her community, and for wanting to disturb their equanimity by putting a cat among them. She, in turn, demanded that before the city even hurt a single squirrel in the prosperous part of the city, the noisy magpies that woke her and her cat up at an ungodly hour every morning in her poor and deprived corner of the city should be laid to rest.

I was annoyed by the response of the lady but it did not cause a wave in the pest control department any more than my letter had done. The squirrels kept multiplying as I expect did the magpies. A neighbour whose garden was suffering from the assault of the greedy creatures took the bull by the horns, trapped a couple and released them in the park a few kilometers away. By a strange coincidence, a park ranger happened to be passing by. He saw the grave violation of the city code and charged him with the offence. Fortunately, the kindly judge took the accused’s long record of community service into consideration and did not hand out an exemplary jail sentence demanded by the prosecutor. He did impose a hefty fine though.

Earlier this summer I observed a reduction in squirrel activity in our yard and more birds on the feeders than in recent years. I pointed it out to my gardener wife who had noticed that fewer of her plants had been damaged this spring. She also observed that a small golden squirrel she had become fond of had not been seen for some days. “Hope the poor thing is OK and some cat or the neighbourhood trapper did not get it,” I said without really sharing my dear wife’s sense of loss.

At last the situation became clear as sometimes happens. Our daughter was visiting from Vancouver last week to help us celebrate our wedding anniversary. She is a keen birdwatcher and after breakfast on Sunday she took out the binoculars to look for birds in the tall poplars bordering the yard. It was not long before she called us in the hushed voice of an experienced birder, “Come and look, a hawk.”

We had seen a variety of birds on our feeders as well as a hummingbird hovering near the window. The only hawks we ever saw were on the fence posts on our way to the mountains. But there it was. Nonchalantly examining the surroundings from its perch on the top branch of the tree like a monarch of all it surveyed. As I admired the majestic bearing of the hawk, it dawned on me that there on the other side of the lens was the perpetrator of the disappearance of the golden squirrel before it had laid any eggs and, along with its associates, the cause of the decline in squirrel population and activity. Lo and behold, Nature had stepped in where the parks department feared to tread and no law-abiding person would dare after the harsh punishment of a long suffering citizen for taking the issue in his own hands. We had the confirmation a couple of days later when four young hawks were sitting on the back of the lawn chairs surrounding a squirrel busily feasting on the birdseeds from the ground. Strangely, the hawks did not look as if they needed the breakfast within easy reach of their claws and the squirrel did not seem at all anxious, her only acknowledgement of the youthful predators being a puffed up tail. After a few minutes of hopping about the yard, the hawks took off; perhaps to return after they had worked up an appetite. Or they felt like magpies for lunch and knew where to find them.