Jan Weenix, Dead Hare and Partridges, c. 1690 (Wikimedia Commons)
People keep talking about the natural world becoming prominent now that self-isolating is firmly established. At my house, we’ve had no shortage of encounters with wildlife, as we’re surrounded by abundant foliage and creatures, but I’m beginning to think that the creatures are, in fact, bringing their dramas closer in.
The area where I live in Rhode Island is partly suburban and partly rural and tends to a certain natural shagginess. Lawns might be neat (or not), but even where home owners have tried to impose order on their particular property, there’s almost always nearby scrub or woods or fully fledged forest. My own backyard is edged by a thin but tangled woods that gets larger and curvier as it winds its way down the road. It’s lush with vines and shrubs and is home to deer, foxes, coyotes, cottontail rabbits, groundhogs, possum, wild turkeys, fisher cats, squirrels and a large array of songbirds. Our feeder attracts cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, tufted titmouse, gold finches and purple ones, chickadees, sparrows, junco, wrens, downy and red-headed woodpeckers, and bluejays. Cat birds and mourning doves also sit in the nearby trees. A few years ago, a pair of great horned owls sat in the oak near our bedroom window and exchanged mating negotiations around midnight, night after night, until at last the rituals were complete. Sometimes in summer we hear shrieks and cries from nameless wildlife in that shaggy scrub and the sounds can be terrible and haunting. More often we hear a cacophony of singing birds, and cicadas, and frogs.
There are hawks, too. Lately there has been an enormous female red-tail who hovers on the air currents, scanning the ground. You can almost feel her pass over before you see her or her shadow. She seems bigger than hawks normally are, though this could just be the effect of her being closer. Perhaps she’s incredibly well fed, and maybe we’re seeing more of her as one of those abundant-wildlife-consequences of COVID time. The rabbits on our property are large right now and numerous, and on Saturday this particular hawk swooped down onto the grass right behind our house and caught one. I didn’t see the strike, but could see something on the lawn that I thought at first was a large piece of broken tree branch. I couldn’t see the hawk. I looked through the binoculars and saw that it was a freshly killed, full-grown cottontail, lying stretched out with its beautiful long feet together. It appeared to be lacking a head, but I saw later on that it was just obscured. A bright red gash on the neck told the whole story; that, and the gruesome entrails, which had already been extracted and scrawled on the grass.
In the time that I waited for the hawk to return, there was a lot of activity in the yard. Clearly the hawk and her kill had created a ripple. The songbirds were gone for a time, but eventually returned. A crow swooped in and took an acorn-sized piece from the rabbit (a kidney maybe?), then flew away and didn’t come back. A very rotund groundhog hustled from the woods across the open grass toward the house, which I’ve never seen before. He was really booking it, almost comically so, but if his plan was to avoid the hawk he was right out in the open. Clearly he wasn’t thinking right. Eventually he dashed under the back porch and then was gone from there in a blink. The presence of this dead rabbit with its exposed viscera was both rattling and a normal occurrence (though certainly not for the humans in the house watching). The songbirds blithely went about their business.
Hours later and I was still checking the backyard. The sight of the rabbit was beautiful and terrible. The fawn-like colours of the fur, those quietly elegant feet, the curled front paws, the long ears. The gash was red and magnetic; impossibly bright. The rib cage sat alone and emptied, and all the entrails were loosely coiled on the ground, all wrong. Poor rabbit. But now that it was so fully in this arrangement, there was nothing to do but admire how complex and baroque the scene was.
I was setting dinner on the table when I saw a flash and turned to see the hawk arrive; she sat on the fence a few feet from the rabbit. She looked at me through the glass, but I stayed very still and she eventually swooped down on the carcass. I watched for close to twenty minutes as she worked at it, amazed by how big she was, and captivated by the straight-forward brutality of her work. Her feathers had the same lushness as the rabbit fur and shared some of the same colours. The rich textures and almost opulent nature of what I was seeing made me think of Renaissance still life paintings. It was vivid and right there: the idea of being consumed. Death and aliveness. (Our own dinner was vegan and served in ceramic pasta bowls and not nearly so suspenseful.)
Eventually the hawk flew off but much of the rabbit remained. Things had changed though. Death had settled in with a dazzling completeness. The red blood was no longer bright and crisp, but ruddy and faded. The fur, too, seemed washed out and the body even more deflated. Much of what was left was earth-coloured and dulling. I hoped the hawk was going to come back and finish, or that some other creature would pull the rabbit, or whatever it now was, into the woods.
When I got up in the morning and came downstairs, I found the hawk hunched at her work, finishing up. She caught sight of me through the glass, which startled her, and she flew off for the final time. But when I looked to see what of her meal was left, I was astonished to see that there were only a few puffs of grey fur and what appeared to be a leg bone. Nothing more. Later in the afternoon, I was looking out the window (which seems such a COVID activity these days) and I saw her flying, riding the currents, perhaps on the lookout for more.