Hawk

Two downy hawk chicks glared out of the car trunk, exuding sharpness from their talons, beaks, and eyes. "Their mother disappeared a few days ago," dad explained. When you spend days in a field, you get to know its inhabitants as well as their conspicuous absences. You see miraculous life and the glory of animals in their habitat, but you also see the natural predation and the machinery accidents that leave nests flattened and small animals mangled.

My dad has eyes like a hawk for the smallest sign of wild creatures. He would spot the mock-injured limp of a mother kilkdeer acting as decoy, and search for the nest she was trying to lure the tractor away from so that he could leave it intact. He would set a large stone beside any nest he found, to mark the avoidance spot for subsequent farming processes. He would spot a hiding fawn before the swather was upon it, and move it out of the way before he continued harvesting; it would have crept back into the standing crop by the time he had made a round, and he would move it again and again. He was always alert, always respectful of wildlife, and always loved the glimpses he caught of owls, elk, foxes, and moose.

Knowing that the abandoned hawk chicks would die sooner rather than later on their own, he brought them home. They went into a large chickenwire cage that had housed an orphan owl more than a decade earlier. I was always eager to understand animals and forge a quiet bond with them, so I was happy to inherit the task of keeping the chicks fed and watered.

For the first while, I fed them eggs that may or may not have been incubated for a while. A couple of our hens were enthusiastic about hatching a brood that summer, and as a result we occasionally had partially-developed eggs that made their way into the other nestboxes; the safest solution at the time was to open every egg, freeze the good ones, and discard the bad ones. And so, I filled a syringe with the scrambled mixture of yolk, blood, and rough outlines of eyeballs, held each chick pinning their talons so they couldn't shred me, and maneuvered the syringe into their beaks where i could discharge the contents right down their throats. Their deadly talons clenched my heavy leather workgloves, and they snapped their beaks fiercely at the syringe.

After a couple weeks I moved on to ground beef, still maintaining the procedure with the syringe. One time I hesitated as I held the syringe in front of them, and realized that they were no longer fighting it; rather, their snaps were more purposeful and they were scrabbling to grab the meat. After that, they received their meals in a bowl.

For a while the two looked identical, but as time went on one of the chicks became runty and underdeveloped. It was still downy when it finally died. The other chick, though, grew strong and fiery, and in time was a rich deep brown with a lighter brown front. Its talons became even more deadly-looking, jet black like the toothbrush-moustache tip of its hooked beak.

I would sit by the cage for hours on the cool earth floor of the shed, watching the hawk and quietly talking to it. One day I confiscated a mouse that I found a cat playing with, and dropped it into the hawk's food bowl. It snapped the mouse up a microsecond after it had touched the dish and swallowed it whole, coughing out a pellet of bones and fur a few hours later.

As the summer wore on, we used a front-end loader to perch the cage outdoors and I had to climb a ladder to feed the hawk. Then, as summer faded to autumn, we brought it back inside, opened the door of the cage, and gave the hawk free run of the shed for a few days. Finally, we opened the main door an armspan and stepped back as the hawk waited for half a moment, took wing, and flew out and away into the trees. I hoped it would cope well on its own.

It was at least a week later that I caught sight of something tumble out from the scrubby willows by the water and take a few tentative steps onto the path that wound around to our yard. Back?? I was shocked that this wild bird that had never shown any domestic tendencies had returned so close to the house. But it must have been hungry; I hurriedly thawed some ground beef and approached it as unmenacingly as I could. The hawk's steely eyes watched me set the dish down, and it quickly consumed the contents before giving me one last sharp look and tottering back into the foliage.

That was the last time I fed my unlikely friend, although I did keep an eye out for its return. A few days later as I roamed in the trees, I stumbled upon a heap of deep and light brown feathers, ranging from soft down to broad flight feathers. It wasn't far from where I had buried my tiger finch the previous winter. Sadly, I picked out one perfect beautiful feather, and took it back to the house where I placed it in a vase on my desk.

Finch

"I always wanted a pair of finches," my dad told me on the long drive home from the pet store in the city. Two tiny tiger finches were in a little cardboard box; they were going to be my "Small Pets" 4-H project for the year. A drab light-brown female, and a dusky gray male with burnished copper cheeks, white breast, and a strip of copper speckles dividing his white front from gray back. Both finches had pumpkin-orange beaks and feet. Neither of them ever had names.

They were tiny bundles of energy, hopping ceaselessly back and forth from one perch to the other. They only stopped their nasal finch-beep calls when they were dozing, and the male would lustily sing his shrill melody as often as he could. Their cage sat on top of the record player, just to the left of the TV. Whenever they heard a tiger roar on the TV, they would both raise their voices in alarm, warning everyone who cared to listen of the nearby danger.

In the evening they would lean against each other, grooming themselves and taking turns preening each other's faces. At night they roosted snuggled side by side, their tiny beaks silent and tucked behind their wings. I covered their cage with a lightweight cotton baby blanket adorned with images of zoo animals. They would stay quiet until the blanket was removed in the morning, and daylight refilled them with energy and song.

One evening in their first year, the male escaped the cage and flapped terrified around the house, descending the staircase and losing his way completely until he came to a frightened perch in the pitch dark family room. I found him tucked in a bookshelf, his little talons clinging to the books. The first thing that became apparent was that he was all but blind in the dark, which made him easy enough to catch. His tiny body felt massless in my fist, and his little heart thumped furiously against my fingers until I deposited him back into the cage.

They began in a smallish cage, but soon inherited a two-storey rig cobbled together from smaller cages, with multiple entries and nooks. In one of the doors I attached an enclosed addon bath that they used to enthusiastically splash the entire vicinity, until I filled it with shredded kleenex for them to use as a nest instead.

They tried diligently to raise a nest of eggs, but the chicks would inevitably die days after hatching and be unceremoniously pushed onto the cage floor. The female was always sickly, and died at age two. She sat on the floor of the cage for the final day or two; one morning I found her lying on her back with her little orange feet gently curled toward the sky, while her partner sat quietly on the highest perch possible.

One day I forgot to close the cage door after refilling his food dish, and noticed with some alarm that he was perched on the open door looking out at the room for a long time. Eventually he turned and hopped back inside, and I quickly latched the door behind him.

But before long we began to keep the door open for him to come and go as he pleased. Most of the time he sat in the plant stand in front of the large living room window, peering out at the trees and wildlife and picking at the houseplant leaves. Once in a while he would stretch his wings and fly a lap around the wall segment dividing the living room from the kitchen/dining room before returning to his perch and singing at the world outside the window. When he was hungry, thirsty, or night was falling, he would return to his cage. After he had settled into his nest for the night, I would close the door and cover the cage with his animal print blanket. He had learned from his first frightening brush with freedom, and kept to the open upstairs rooms in his vicinity, scrutinizing his surroundings before embarking on any flight path.

The summer he was four was the summer my parents' new house was being completed across the yard. My eldest brother and his young family had moved in with us in the house my siblings and I were raised in. I was finishing up grade 11, and would move with my parents to the new house for my final year of high school while my brother's family assumed the old house. My brother would farm in partnership with my dad, while my sister-in-law—who had previously run a daycare—began to provide childcare on the farm for a handful of children.

On fine days we hung the finch cage on the deck near the goldfinch feeder, so he could feel the breeze and talk to his wild comrades. Given his free reign of the house, it was probably inevitable that one time he would find himself out on the deck with his cage door inadvertently open. I came home from school one day to learn that dad had put the finch's cage outside to distance him from the exuberant children that were there that day, not realizing that the cage door was open.

A tiny exotic bird did not stand a chance in the enormous expanse of lawns, gardens, orchard, shelterbelts, dugout, and buildings that formed our yard. Any number of bird or mammalian predators would find him; he would become hopelessly lost in the enormity of the outside world; he would freeze overnight or in the cold prairie rain. Most of all he would be frightened and alone, and in any case he would never be back.

Nevertheless, I traipsed helplessly around the yard as far as the orchard, carrying the cage on the slimmest of hopes that maybe he had had enough exploring and was ready for some familiarity. After my fruitless search, I hung the cage back on the deck and ignored my family's assurances that they'd buy me a replacement bird. I don't want a replacement. I want my little buddy.

In the morning, I walked into the dining room and sighed as I looked out at the forlorn cage on the deck. Then I blinked. My finch was inside, gustily pecking at his food dish. I slid out into the deck and closed the cage door in disbelief, then brought him inside to his spot on the record player by the TV.

The little finch made the move across the yard with us to the new house once it was ready for habitation. But he was five years old now—the lower end of his species' life expectancy—and gray feathers pocked his copper cheeks. Over the year he increasingly slowed down, until one winter morning his little feet reached up to the sky like his partner's had years before.

His body was even lighter in my hand than I remembered, as I carried him out to a bank overlooking the tiny lake and island my dad had painstakingly built. I dug through the snow and into the cold ground beneath, and placed my little wrapped bundle in a shallow hole beneath a willow. I covered it back up and placed a stone on top. Goodbye, little friend.