The Urban Bestiary

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  Besides watchfulness, preparation, and fate, the best way to find city hawks is to have the other birds, crows in particular, tell you where they are. If crows are making a ruckus, it is always worth checking out. Typically, they will be tormenting some poor hated (by the crows) creature, perhaps a canine, feline, human, or raccoon, but most often a hawk. Because both hawks and owls prey upon crow nestlings and even on adult crows (in the case of adult crows, it is often an owl in the night, swooping upon a female crow hushed upon her nest), crows indiscriminately mob all raptors at all times of the year.

  It’s effective. While mature hawks and eagles will seem to ignore the mob, young hawks can be at a complete loss in the face of crow attacks, and while observing such mobs, I find that my sympathy runs both ways. Crows have reason to fear. I have seen a Cooper’s hawk calmly eating a barely fledged crow as the parent birds shrieked in a rare vocalization that I can only describe as horror tinged with the crow version of sorrow. But very often there is no immediate danger, and the hawk being mobbed is young and likely hungry, one of the birds that, like most hawks, will not live to its first birthday. When the young hawk is pelted by crows, the look in its eyes will sometimes change from that aloof self-possession that raptors exude to thin desperation. In any case, when crows are in an uproar, always check it out. It is a good habit, and a simple one, to follow the messages of birds. We will so often be led, in the middle of a day that was otherwise normal, into an unexpected urban circumstance, magical in its wildness—the things that fly, literally beneath (or above) our typical human radar.

  But we must remember too that, as is true for coyotes, moles, and mice, there are more raptors among us than we see or even know. We love to see the bird itself, but glimpses are hard-won. To follow the storied presence of raptors in our urban lives, we watch for more than their feathered bodies. We find the presence of hawks and owls in their whitewashes, in their pellets, and in the trail of their sustenance—the bits and pieces of prey animals they leave behind.

  The first thing I noticed when I went out for a morning walk the other day was that the patch of earth beneath the big cypress in front of my house had been sprinkled with a circle of glitter. I knelt down and scooped some of the sprinkles into my hand—they were the gold-tipped edges of adult starling feathers. The more I searched, the more I found, and I was eventually led to the hapless bird’s head, separated from the missing body and stuck bright-yellow-beak-first into the soil at the base of my tree. Well, this was a singular and unnerving scene, even for a self-proclaimed urban naturalist. I decided to leave the head where it was, just to see what would happen next. (The following morning the feathered skull was entirely gone, but the yellow beak was still stuck in the ground!) Walking to the library later that day, I spotted a Cooper’s hawk and imagined it to be a bit extra-plump, perched there on an electrical wire, with a satisfied I-have-just-consumed-a-starling look about it. Like many bird-eating raptors, Cooper’s hawks often behead their prey before defeathering and eating it. I have read in several natural science and track/sign treatises that such-and-such hawk species always eats the head, such-and-such owl species never does. But in practice, there seem to be no hard-and-fast species-specific rules about head-eating and head-leaving, so the presence or absence of a head seems to me a dubious who-ate-this-bird clue. Nearly all bird-eating raptors will eat viscera first, then sinew, discarding the legs and the wings (there is some dissonance in seeing a pretty little kestrel or saw-whet owl with its foot wrapped around a mouse, the mouse’s entrails dangling indelicately from the bird’s bill like spaghetti). Some raptors slurp out the skull’s contents but leave the skull itself, as with my starling.

  Bats, Creatures of Air

  No, bats are not raptorial birds. But in the Aberdeen and other medieval bestiaries, they appear alongside the birds, typically the owls. Just as I was about to dismiss this in my mind as a quaint medievalism, I recalled that over the years, several well-educated people have said to me something along the lines of, You study birds, right? So, I have this question about bats… I’ll mention as gently as possible that bats, of course, aren’t birds, after which there is a startled and embarrassed pause. Obviously, the questioner knows this. We all know that bats are mammals, the only mammals with true, powered flight. Most of us know that they are beneficial mammals in the urban landscape, each eating about two thousand mosquitoes every night. I used to wonder over such bird/mammal confusion, to see it as an ill-thought-out muddle stemming from inconsistent exposure to good natural history training, but now I see it differently. We humans seek to categorize, to put things into a kind of order. One valid order is the scientific/taxonomic—in some circles, it is the only valid ordering for the organismic world. But another tendency that seems to inhere in us is a penchant for understanding things elementally. The bat and the bird, whatever their taxonomic grouping, are creatures of air. When Claire was very young, I scolded Tom on a boat in Alaska when he pointed to a breaching gray whale and said to our impressionable and toothless young daughter, “Honey! Look at the big fishy!” Fishy? (After all these years, he hasn’t lived down the comment, and I haven’t lived down my overreaction!) But again, this is a common parental utterance, one that may be based more on an intrinsic bond with elemental nature than on a misunderstanding of biology. There is something beautiful here—a wild, immediate sensibility that appears to be innate, bodily, and unarguably true.

  Bats live among us, largely unnoticed. Of the several species that have adapted to urban places, the most common are the little brown bat, which hibernates in the winter, and the big brown bat, active year-round. All species hang upside down by their feet, typically with their wings wrapped around their bodies, and if startled, they can drop into sudden flight. Females like protected places with consistent temperatures for their nurseries and come into conflict with humans when they gather in attics, and people complain of noise, guano, or just being creeped out by bats. Autumn is the best time to seal potential bat entrances—young bats will be grown and flying, and hibernation will not have begun. Bats have flourished in North America since the time of dinosaurs, but in the last five years, the skin disease known as white-nose syndrome has killed millions of bats. Sick bats were first discovered in New York City, and since then the disease has devastated populations in the Northeast, spreading swiftly to at least sixteen states. Putting up bat houses on human-approved sections of our houses might assist bats while keeping them from congregating in our attics.

  Watch for feathers, wings, leftover heads and feet. A cat-kill site will be a random mess; hawks tend to stand in the middle of a “faerie ring” of plucked feathers, like the starling-glitter in my yard. You can tell whether the bird was scavenged or killed fresh by examining the feather pile. A freshly plucked bird will leave no flesh sticking to its feather tips, but bits of flesh come off with the feathers of a cold bird. This is messy and perhaps unwelcome information, but poetic in its way. We learn to read the world, the wild trails among us, to know it as biology, as story, as shared life.

  The legs and feet of both hawks and owls are endowed with an involuntary clutching mechanism that allows the bird to ratchet tightly about its prey and pull it close to its body. I learned this viscerally one day when, years ago, I was interning as a raptor rehabber and needed to change the bandage on a red-tailed hawk’s wing. When handling red-tails, we normally wore thick leather gloves that reached up to our elbows to protect against the talons and the clutching (it’s different than handling, say, a small falcon, like a kestrel or merlin, where garden gloves suffice). This day, I wanted my fingers free to do a nice job with the delicate bandaging and heedlessly believed myself beyond harm from this beloved hawk. I pulled my Carhartt jacket down to my wrist, then picked up the bird with my bare hands. Like most birds, red-tails are funny about being held; if you have their wings pinned, they don’t really think they can get away and tend to relax, especially if everything else around them is calm. I tucked the seemingly mellow bird under
one elbow so I could work on her with both hands. In a moment of inattention, I carelessly reached across her belly, and she got me. Two hawk feet were clasped more deeply and tightly than I ever thought possible around my spindly forearm. The talons didn’t penetrate my skin, but within a minute, my hand began to feel stiff, then went numb. The hawk seemed totally relaxed. Clearly this was costing her no effort whatsoever, and I was sure that if I dangled her from my arm and shook madly, she still would not have budged. Eyes beginning to bulge from my skull, I wandered the grounds with the injured, clinging bird until I finally found a friend to help me. “I’m a loon researcher,” he deadpanned, “I don’t do hawks.” Funny. He had to peel the hawk’s toes, one by one, from my arm. No blood, but I had an impressive blue bruise in the treelike shape of a hawk’s foot, new respect for raptorial feet, and deepened empathy for their prey.

  Barred Owls and Urban Attacks

  The barred owl is a beautiful bird, closely related to the northern spotted owl, an ecologically sensitive species, dependent on deep, ancient forests. Barred owls are larger, more adaptable, and more aggressive than the spotted, and where the two species overlap, it appears that barred owls disrupt the smaller owls’ nesting process, compete with them for food, and sometimes even attack or kill them. Unlike spotted owls, barred owls can adapt to scrappier forest and disturbed forest edges and urban parks. In recent years, its range has expanded dramatically westward and now includes the beachside park near my home, where a pair of owls have been attacking hapless joggers who venture too near their nest. (Conjecture on the neighborhood blog has run wild. Perhaps the owls thought a certain jogger’s bald head was a rat?) Such incidents are not at all the norm, but similar reports are turning up across the country. Barred owls have just recently begun nesting so close to human habitation, and they are protecting their nests from a large, unfamiliar, strangely bipedal mammal. People associate nesting behavior with springtime, but owls begin setting up territories in the darkest winter. It is a delight to have owls among us, but defensive parent owls can terrify. Give them a wide berth, and if your daily walk or jog takes you in their path, then walk with your arms over your head, waving them gently as if you are a human willow tree, or carry an umbrella and put it up in owl territory. Consider working with park or city officials to create an educational sign to help protect both humans and nesting owls. (The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service continues to contemplate killing barred owls to protect spotteds, but disturbed urban parks are a perfectly good place for barred owls, and heroic preservation of ancient forests is the only workable long-term protection for the spotted owl.) From a respectful distance, owl watching is perfectly safe.

  In the early decades of the twentieth century, Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks were persecuted as “vicious bird killers.” Men and boys would set up with rifles at migration routes to drop as many of the birds as possible, day after day. Even avian conservation organizations joined in sanctioning the slaughter to protect songbirds, and tens of thousands of hawks were killed. As science and conservation took a more ecological turn, the role of predators came to the fore, and the mass killing for the most part stopped by midcentury, giving the accipiter populations time to recover before their numbers were again decimated later in the century by DDT (though not to quite as perilous a brink as peregrines, ospreys, and bald eagles).

  Surely it is natural to feel compassion for songbirds or prey animals in any instance. Who doesn’t root for the gazelle, at least on some level, in all those nature documentaries? And of course, no one is obligated to love birds of prey in particular. But one of the strangest incidents of irrational hawk hatred involves the revered ornithologist Alexander Skutch, author of some of my most treasured natural history volumes, including the massive Field Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica, which I carried around every second of my honeymoon in spite of its size and my poor groom’s slight jealousy (shouldn’t I be paying at least as much attention to him?). Before his death, in 2004, Skutch penned some of the most observationally patient treatises on the behavior and consciousness of neotropical birds ever written, and his treatments combine a poetico-spiritual absorption with watchful scientific detail—indeed, it is possible that he observed these birds more thoroughly than anyone else on earth. So I was shocked when I eventually learned that on the sanctuary he kept and conserved for neotropical birds, he not only discouraged birds of prey, but actively hunted and killed them. He exempted the laughing falcons that nested near his hut from this sinister regime because they killed snakes, another hated predator! Dr. Skutch’s activities were fueled in part by the evolution of his increasingly delusional philosophy that earthen nature should exist in a state of blissful harmony; predators were out of step with this vision. For years I have sought a way to reconcile Skutch’s rare insight into animal ways and avian consciousness with this astonishing gap in his ecological understanding. But to this moment I remain bewildered, and for now must live with this tension, Skutch’s books always within reach on my study shelves.

  Just yesterday I looked randomly, without expectation, out my kitchen window and witnessed the split second that it took a small sharp-shinned hawk to dive low and flat into the rhododendrons by the back fence. In another second she was standing on the ground beneath the cherry tree, breathing hard, as I was. In the diving of a hungry hawk there is a purity of physical intent that is seldom experienced by humans, except in the most rarefied moments of athletic achievement. My response—immediate, heightened, unsettled excitement—was involuntary. I thought the hawk had missed, that she was just recovering from her effort, but in a second glance I saw a varied thrush on its back beneath the hawk’s thin yellow foot. Varied thrushes are one of my favorite birds, and this year I have been delighting in their backyard presence. We usually have just one or two visit occasionally, but this autumn a half dozen have been here every day. The thrush’s upturned feet were moving on their hinges as the hawk went to work defeathering her catch. Bird-hunting hawks typically use their bills to pluck most feathers from their prey, so I was surprised to see this sharpie using her feet in quick jogging motions to remove the light breast feathers. Soon the two birds were shrouded in a cloud of down. I felt my body move forward and realized that it was going to rescue the thrush. Even after I saw that it was futile (not to mention ecologically unenlightened), my mind and body remained in involuntary dissonance on this subject (forgivably so, I think—the impulse to compassion is not objective, not scientific, but remains one of our most beautiful human capacities).

  Raptor Trails: Wash and Pellets

  We all recognize white splat as an indicator of bird presence, but raptor leavings are unique. Most birds excrete all their waste—solid and liquid—in one swoop; depending on the bird’s diet, we see the solid waste as a dark color, brownish or green, and the uric acid is white. Mammals defecate and urinate through different passageways, so if you see a tubular scat and aren’t sure whether it was made by a mammal or a large bird, maybe a goose, the coating of white uric acid is a good clue to avian origin (unless the scats are quite old and dried up, in which case the whiteness can disappear). In most birds the solids and white uric acid remain clearly distinct, but many groups, including the herons, gulls, crows, hawks, and owls, just excrete mainly white uric acid through their vents and egest most solid waste by coughing up a pellet full of the indigestibles—feathers, bones, fur, seeds, occasionally the thick skins of fruits. Thus, wash of hawks and owls is pure liquid-white, and waterfalls of whitewash down the side of a tree can indicate a favorite owl perch. Always search when you see such sign—look up for owls and below for pellets or feathers or even bits of dead prey animals. Hawks leave such wash too, but they tend to be less committed to a single perch than owls, and they lift their tails and spray their excreta farther, making less of an obvious stream down the side of a tree.

  Raptor pellets may contain seeds and cellulose from the birds’ stomachs, but they are famous for being full of fur and bones, which intrepid naturalists
can often identify to species. You can tell hawk and owl pellets apart—hawks tend to have stronger digestive juices, so small bones don’t usually make it into the pellet. A hawk pellet may have fur, and just the largest, most indigestible bone, but owl pellets might contain entire skeletons, including the pellet explorer’s prize—perfect tiny skulls.

  The formation of pellets is a fascination. After the bird swallows prey, a kind of pellet-making compartment is created when the sphincters between the stomach and the gizzard close. After a few hours, the indigestible remains of the prey are squeezed into an ever-tightening space, and within about ten hours, the pellet is fixed. There it sits until egestion begins. For most raptors, the meal-to-pellet interval (yes, the MPI in the scientific journals) is between thirteen and twenty hours. One good meal per day.

  The owl pellets that schools obtain for student study have been sterilized, and on top of this, students are usually made to wear gloves when examining them. The advice from one popular biological supply catalog reads: “Handle owl pellets, even sterilized ones, as though they could be a source of bacterial or viral contamination.”