“Nothing is so beautiful as spring,” gushed Gerard Manley Hopkins. “What is all this juice and all this joy?”
The mid-nineteenth-century priest and poet likened the lush blooming of the season to Eden’s paradise. Personally, the sunny heads of daffodils and plum tongues of crocuses lift my spirits as I walk the woods around my home.
But there are plenty of reminders of what Hopkins’s contemporary, Alfred Tennyson, famously described as nature “red in tooth and claw.”
The other day, my attention was directed to the nearby treetops, where a half-dozen crows were making a racket. A flock of these black birds is actually called a murder; maybe they were up to no good. Another winged creature thought so. A distinctive cry pierced the air, and a red-tailed hawk streaked into view like a feathered arrow.
I knew there were raptors nesting somewhere along this trail; I’d seen them wheeling in the sky for several weeks. This hawk buzzed within ten feet of the crows, causing the whole murder of them to bolt for a neighboring tree with enough cawing to wake the dead. A crow is clever, scrappy, and capable of violence. But while these ones had the numerical advantage, they lacked the lethal beak and talons of their burlier cousin. One does not bring a butter knife against a switchblade.
Suddenly, another cry turned my head to see the hawk’s mate bolting through the blue sky. The crows high-feathered it out of there, and they were not the only creatures intimidated by the raptors.
Beside me on the leash, the house wolf, who is generally looks at other creatures as snack food, had her tail tucked between her legs. I assured my canine companion that we were only observers, not combatants, in this avian drama — and she gladly led me down the trail in the opposite direction.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of “Little Big Moments,” a collection of mini-essays about parenting, and “Tigers, Mice & Strawberries: Poems.” Both titles are available most anywhere books are sold online. Taylor-Troutman lives in Chapel Hill where he serves as pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and occasionally stumbles upon the wondrous while in search of his next cup of coffee.
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