I Have This Thing For Nature

I’m in love. Can’t help it. I live where I’ve a full view right through my front window – a view of the Western Slope. Funny thing is I actually feel the aliveness and consciousness of nature. It’s as if what’s in nature communicates with me.

Take for instance the red tail hawk. For now, we’ll call him red hawk. We have two mating pairs in our little valley here on the western slope and they indeed make life interesting. In Native American lore, the hawk is a messenger from “the Great Spirit” and it is known to bring you what you need to know when you need to know it. Red hawks hang around writers, as writers are messengers of the Great Spirit as well.

For me the Red Hawk confirms some heavy thought I have by making sure to cross my path at the EXACT moment of the thought. Even if I’m driving on the freeway to or from work, I’ll have this heavy thought about stuff I’m doing and right ahead of me on a freeway lamp post that’s curving over the road sits a red hawk and he’s looking right at me. No joke. Or he’ll cross my path in flight.

Brief tangent..though related to birds…

Reminds me of this story my husband heard at the local lumber yard when we were building Wildwind. Up country where we live, people are more friendly and they often talk to strangers as in this case. These two old codgers were talking and Gordon, my husband, got in on the conversation.

One was telling the other about this story, singing its praises and truths. A trucker driving his rig up the freeway saw another truck pulled off the road, steam billowing from in front of the truck. He pulled up behind him and stopped, got out and walked to the front of the truck where the strangest sight greeted him.

Sticking straight out of the grill of the truck was a huge fish, head buried deep in its grill. Best they could figure, an eagle must have caught the fish and carried it off but lost its grip on it somewhere mid-air. The streamlined and hydrodynamic fish flew through the air like a torpedo and slammed into the grill of this diesel.

Which bears the telling of my own story. Our home is wood, three stories tall and sits amidst a grove of trees that tops the western ridge of our land. This ridge is inhabited by woody woodpecker and his 10,000 relatives. He is as annoying in real life as in the cartoons. They’ve taken a liking to our home and love to shove their nuts underneath our roof shingles on the west side. Sometimes they miss and the nuts cascade down our rain gutter drain right outside my office.

One way to get rid of them is to play those incessantly worse-than-they-are electronic tapes of birds in distress. Not an option. Trust me on this. I love bird song, but birds in distress must hit my maternal ear, cause I get upset. So when PGE took out the power pole at the bottom of our driveway and replaced it with a new one because the Peckers had pecked the old one to Swiss cheese, we asked if we could have it-they said yes.

We went down the driveway and drug it up the hill with the truck, found a place a good 50 feet off the house and put it into the ground in the hopes that this would act like a “lightening rod” and keep the peckers off the house and on their “own” pecker pole.

Yep that’s what we call it – the pecker pole. I’d put a picture here of it but it will have to wait for later, the computer it’s on is unplugged for its move upstairs and I’m not going to go mess with it right now.

So when the Peckers starting using the Pecker Pole as a staging area, the war got serious. My husband bought an inexpensive BB gun from Walmart and took to target practice. Now wood peckers are protected birds, so his intent is to just scare them off, not harm them. Since he wasn’t having any luck because the BB gun’s barrel shoots the BB’s away in an arc, I suggested he bring in the help of the red tail hawk.

I just love the way they look and don’t be fooled they’ve got a wingspan up to five feet! As the story goes, one day he was pumping away with the BB gun at this particularly annoying Alpha Male when he got a shot off that tipped its wing. It dropped to the ground for a momentary regroup when KREEEEE came the voice of the red tail hawk.

When the hawk screeches the tree’s populace goes oh-so-quiet.

We ran around to the front deck in time to see the Red Hawk slip right out of the sky in a quick drop to the ground and leap back into the air like he took off from a trampoline, Alpha Male woodpecker locked in its talons. Suffice it to say we had no trouble from the woodpeckers for many a month after that and every time the hawk flies overhead with his shadow dappling the ground, the woodpeckers don’t utter a sound.

In truth I appreciate the woodpeckers and their dilemma as much as I appreciate the Red Tail Hawk, but sometimes it’s nice to get some natural justice, ay?

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Tags: Animals, Bird, Kids and Teens, Living Things, Red-tailed Hawk, School Time, United States, Woodpecker