As I swerve along California’s Route 1, a small brown rodent darts across the road. Looking up, I hear a piercing shriek and see a wide-winged bird hurtling from on high. A few feet above my open-top convertible, the avian assassin, talons outstretched and beak gaping, brakes to a mid-air stop, flounces its feathers and jets back to the heavens. I watch, utterly enraptured.
Raptors—birds of prey that include eagles, hawks and falcons—have been enthralling humans for thousands of years. Egyptians worshiped a sky god with the head of a falcon. Eagles flew on the banners of the Roman legions that conquered the known world. In European kingdoms, raptors led royal hunting expeditions. Since 1782 the proud bald eagle, unique to North America, has preened as the national symbol of the United States.
Widespread use of the pesticide DDT in the 1950s weakened the egg shells of eagles and other raptors, endangering their survival. After a national ban in 1972, their numbers rebounded. In recent decades, citizen-scientists have been monitoring raptors’ annual fall migrations to provide crucial data about these environmental sentinels. But whenever I join volunteer Hawkwatchers, I realize that more than a research mission inspires their vigils.
“Observing raptors is as close as we can get to flying,” says Dave Barry, who has headed a West Sonoma County team since 2012. Nothing else compares with the dazzling airborne acrobatics of these masters of the sky.
The fastest animals on the planet, peregrine falcons fold their pointed wings close to their bodies and “stoop,” diving on a target at speeds exceeding 200 miles per hour. Accipiters, forest-dwellers like the Cooper’s hawk, navigate through narrow gaps between tree tops and branches with nimble rounded wings. Harriers hunt by “coursing,” flying low over the contours of the land as a specialized facial disk detects the sounds of creatures hidden in the brush.
In gulches and valleys where columns of warm air (thermals) rise from the ground, groups of raptors “kettle,” circling round and round to reach higher altitudes without expending much energy. During long-distance migrations, they glide, riding the winds with barely a flap of their wings. Many raptors, including eagles, “kite,” hanging in the wind, almost motionless as they wait for prey to break cover.
The aerial dramas intensify in autumn, when migrating raptors, such as ferruginous hawks, swoop into the turf of year-round residents of the Sonoma coast. The locals may take to the air, squawk, unfurl their wings and drop their talons. In a heated territorial dispute, two raptors may lock talons together mid-flight in a display of strength and agility so impressive that it can trigger what one onlooker described as “a dopamine rush.”
Even a close-up of a perched raptor can be a heady experience. Viewed through a powerful birding scope, a red-tailed hawk (the type that dive-bombed my car) displays a sleek head, large eyes that see ten times more acutely than a human’s, a rapier-sharp beak that can slice a victim’s throat in a blink, vice-like talons and rusty-reddish-brown plumage as lush and ornate as an emperor’s robe.
Today’s hawkwatchers would have found a kindred spirit in the Renaissance artist and naturalist Leonardo da Vinci. “Once you have tasted flight,” he observed more than five centuries ago, “you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward.” And if you’re lucky, your soul may soar like the raptors you behold.
My thanks to @AdrianPhilip_Photography for the beautiful images of a ferruginous and juvenile red-tail hawk in flight and of a raptor on the wing over the Sonoma Coast.
