Alan Liere: In admiration of birds

I have been watching six turkey vultures the past few days. They’re not something I normally see here just north of Spokane. Although I find them extremely homely, they are graceful in flight and have an important niche cleaning up dead things. This particular flock had found a dead deer just off the road near my house.

It has occurred to me that birds spend most of their time looking for food. The quail, pheasants, turkeys and doves near my house, for example, are always in my newly planted fields pecking away at the seeds that were supposed to produce forage for them in the winter. Currently, there is a woodpecker pounding his beak into the bark of a dead fir by the house searching for insects. I admired his tenacity until I discover he had also pecked a hole in the side of my house.

I have mixed feeling about crows and magpies, too. Both are noisy no matter what they are doing. A lot of times, flying crows are accompanied by a half-dozen smaller birds dipping and diving at them. I always wonder if the crow has done something terrible to generate the ire of the smaller birds. I imagine crows are one of the few birds that think about something other than their next meal; I think they think about maiming all the small birds that torment them. If I was a crow, I would.

I can’t see a sparrow without thinking of popcorn. In every parking lot in town, sparrows are eating popcorn. Sometimes they are driven off by seagulls, which are also attracted to parking lot popcorn.

I don’t hold city hobo sparrows or seagulls in very high regard, though the seagulls on the ocean are certainly self-sufficient and magnificent in flight. They are also quite the gluttons, however. I saw seagulls at a fish cleaning station in Westport, Washington that consumed so many fish guts they couldn’t fly.

Nevertheless, when another bloody carcass hit the beach, there was a waddling race to get it. I have known people like that, too, who couldn’t turn their backs on free eats even if they didn’t have room for it.

From my deck, I see a red-tailed hawk cruising the air currents hour after hour looking for a mouse or a gopher or even an unwary rabbit or a turkey poult, and I am struck by the thought that all he has to do all day is hunt. I wonder if he ever goes to sleep at night with an empty belly. If he does, I wonder if he worries about it.

I know for sure a hawk never worries about the electric bill, or the price of gasoline, or whether the Mariners won or lost. I doubt he agonizes, either, over presidential elections or sports scandals or orphans in Africa. A bird of prey just IS. I think I would like to be one.

I would choose to be either an osprey or a falcon. Each hunts from up high, turning into a deadly feathered missile with wings tucked in as it plummets toward its quarry. The osprey hits the water with a loud “smack!” and usually emerges with a fish. The falcon hits a pigeon in a violent shower of feathers. One fishes all day, the other hunts. What could be better than that?