in proximity to raptors
The first dream I had about a hawk felt like a meaningful indicator. It was several months ago, in it I was standing at the edge of a forest. The forest was old growth, deciduous, highly stratified: full of tall trunks spaced far from each other, nothing but empty space between them. Even the trees’ lowest branches were high and distant, and the understory lacked vegetation. A barren floor was beneath my feet, layered thickly with autumn leaves. Through the canopy shined sunlight so bright that it washed out the colors of the dream, left every leaf in a pale shade and the bark of the trees an unsaturated grey. Nearby was a pond that the sun turned into one glittering blob of light.
A hawk crashed downwards through this forest, a bullet of wind-ruffled feathers shooting through incandescent air. It landed only briefly, beside me among the leaves, and then it lifted itself up onto my left fist. The hawk’s plumage was an intricate motley of bright white, brick red, and dusty gold. It was not muted like the surroundings. It was a huge, luminous creature—buoyant and overwhelming and once it was perched it swallowed every other sight on the left side of my body. The pond was gone, the trees were blotted out. On my hand it sat willingly, haloed in light, with its wings held out, its chest lifted, its dark and serious eyes gazing at me from above a sharp hook of a beak.
I don’t remember the dream having a plot. It was just me and the hawk there in the woods alone. A brief scene, a dream the duration of a TikTok. Despite its open-winged, defensive posture, I didn’t feel concerned. I recall thinking, ‘Oh, you’re here.’ You. As if we knew each other.
Somehow, in less than six months, I have had seven species of raptor, and ten raptors total, use my left arm as a perch. This is simply not the direction I thought 2025 would go for me. Birds of prey have abruptly taken over my life. Once they embedded themselves into my dreams, that feeling solidified—that I was becoming a bit obsessed. Back in April or May, when barred owls and red-shouldered hawks and kestrels began roaming my subconscious mind, birds with personalities and selves and fully-imagined, detailed forms, I had the sense that they were going to stay in my dreams forever; they would stay the way certain things from my childhood and teenage years stay, things that have enamored and frightened and challenged me. The enduring motifs of my dreams.
I began volunteering with a raptor rehabilitation center last fall with no expectation that I would ever work so closely and cooperatively with raptors. I had a vague idea, accompanied by tempered excitement, when I sent in an application to become a member of their team of educators: Imagine me with a vulture on my arm one day. But I couldn’t begin to picture where this notion would lead me. I figured I would be content with teaching about the things I’m used to teaching about—ecology, evolution, native Ohio wildlife—satisfied that I could lend those skills to the center even if I was incapable of actually interacting with the wildlife.
Fast forward from November 2024 to July 2025. I’ve been telling people that after I spend a day working with these birds, I feel high. Giddy, ecstatic. I’m quickly forgetting what it was like when I didn’t greet a barn full of birds every week or feel the tense warm grip of talons on my gloved fingers. I recognize the state of myself, quite easily, as a state of falling in love.
I find it somewhat hilarious how simple proximity to a new thing, under the right circumstances, can change my perspective on my entire life. Up close to a great horned owl for the first time, drinking in the sight of her woodland-patterned plumage, her cinnamon face, her stern yellow eyes, I think, Wait. Wait a minute. And I am reeling. My first time volunteering at the center, outside of orientations, I helped weigh Hera, one of the center’s ambassador great horned owls. And when I say I “helped,” I mean that when she refused to relinquish her incomprehensibly tight grip on the perch affixed to the scale, I was asked to pick up the entire scale-plus-perch and turn it upside down, effectively told to try and dump the contrary owl off of it. I grabbed the scale with both hands and leaned backwards as far as I could, my eyes glued in fascination to her horrifyingly large black talons, her immense feathered feet so close to the very fragile-looking skin of the back of my hands.
Then I lifted it, carefully tipped it over. As soon as I did, her wings spread from her sides, and just as with the hawk in the dream, my vision was obscured. All there was was Hera’s wings, open, then beating quietly and strongly as she tried to keep her balance. One of her wings swiped right across the front of my face. The feathers were as soft as velvet. It was the first time I’d ever made physical contact with an owl. I wanted to laugh. I was wondering what in the world it was that I’d gotten myself into. This kind of thing has happened to me many times before: at times in my life I’ve brushed up against something, not thinking much of it. Then, when I look it straight in the face, later on, I am completely astounded by it.
Now that I have comprehended the inexorable, familiar nature of what is happening to me (‘I’m changing as a person,’ I texted my older sister recently, when we were discussing the progression of my ‘raptor era.’), I’ve started expanding my knowledge of raptors, reading published science and seeking out books. One topic I keep coming across in scientific literature is the barred owl’s “invasion” of western North America. Barred owls historically have been an eastern species, confined to this side of the continent because their ideal forest habitat peters out as you approach the plains regions beyond the Mississippi River, with hundreds of miles separating the eastern deciduous forests from the mountainous coniferous forests of the west. But since the beginning of the 20th century, barred owls have been moving slowly into Washington and Oregon, into California. This movement is the result of numerous factors, ranging from fire suppression across the continent to other human-spurred habitat changes in both the American plains and in Canadian boreal forests.
Scientists are worried about how barred owls will change, disrupt, destabilize ecosystems in the west. Like many raptors, barred owls are generalist, opportunistic hunters. They prefer to nest in old, large trees, and so as long as those criteria are met, they can likely find ways to survive and find prey that is suitable. They are also fairly territorial and can be aggressive. Other owl species unaccustomed to barred owls, species like spotted owls, western screech owls, flammulated owls, and so on, are either suspected to be or confirmed to be negatively affected by the presence of barred owls, which are competitors, but also predators of some of these owls.
Researchers have documented the ways native western owl species are adjusting their behavior to contend with their new neighbors. Some species are making less noise, for instance, reducing the amount of vocalizations they make so as to avoid detection by any barred owls in the vicinity. They aren’t calling attention to themselves, lest they be hurt. How this is affecting the ability of these owls to communicate with members of their own species, to locate mates, and to form pictures of other owls’ territories, is still being studied—but we know for sure that barred owls are imperiling the California spotted owl and the northern spotted owl, two subspecies of the spotted owl that live in the old growth forests of the west.
Spencer is the name of the barred owl I work with. He is more than ten years old, blind in his right eye as a result of an injury that brought him to the raptor center initially, and he spends most of his time while on my glove staring with fathomless dark eyes directly into my soul. Despite the urge some people have to cast these owls in the role of invasive villain in the west, I can’t help but be extraordinarily fond of them. About a month ago when I asked a young girl who was having her birthday party at the raptor center if she had a favorite raptor—intending to ask about her favorite species of raptor—she instead said simply, a smile on her face: Spencer. And I understood her completely.
And after all, the thing about invasive species—any kind of invasive species—is that they’re all comprised of individuals just trying to survive as best as they can. In the early spring, the forager and educator Alexis Nicole Nelson posted a YouTube video in which she stands in a forest not completely unlike the one from my hawk dream, except in many places the ground is sprouting one plant already adorned with green leaves—a medium-sized understory plant that is leafing out ahead of all the other, more slowly awakening plants. She urges her viewers to slay this plant without mercy: 'Bask in the violence just this once.'
Invasive Amur honeysuckle was brought to the Americas from Asia, and now it crowds out innumerable native plants due in large part to this early leafing out, this special phenology that evolved in ecosystems half a world away. But—I spent my childhood oblivious to the nefarious nature of honeysuckle. I was taught by my dad how to lick its nectar from the flowers, and I had a lot of fun doing just that. Honeysuckle was a welcome member of my backyard and its smell still reminds me of springtime as a kid. Now when I am walking along the edges of the woods and the sweet scent reaches my nose, the emotion I feel is a bittersweet one. In some ways it reminds me of all the things I didn’t realize, as a kid, were causing damage. To the land, to me.
My reality is that I know I won’t ever feel simple, uncomplicated hatred for any living thing. Humans themselves, having spread across the entire planet, are invasive. We are decimating and destabilizing, changing and disrupting ecosystems. I understand that being alive means being a villain and being a hero and being everything in between. It means being both the species and an individual trying to survive.
In the world of birds, three-quarters of individuals die in their very first year of life. Life as a wild bird is incomprehensibly taxing and stressful. I think of spotted owls going quiet after the arrival of barred owls. Evasion to survive, intrusion to survive. These tactics—and others just as desperate—that are born from knowing you could be on the cusp of death at any moment, that have never really left any of us. Owl, human, honeysuckle. And the indelible molecular propellers that animate us in complicated ways none of us fully, fully understand.
Distributions of species change all the time. What barred owls are doing is not unexpected. Throughout the history of our planet, as continents have shifted and collided and separated, as climates have changed, things have changed. The common ancestor of modern owls likely lived around fifty million years ago. The Tytonidae family of owls, which includes the cosmopolitan barn owl, likely emerged in Southeast Asia and then radiated outward from there to the places that today are Oceania, Africa, Europe and the Americas. And everywhere they landed and began calling home, they altered. And now, millions of years later, we alter them like we are altering every species. Through our decimation of plant and animal populations, our changing of the climate. Today in Europe, one team of researchers from the University of Milan is studying microplastic prevalence in the pellets of barn owls. These owls are loyal to a roost usually in rural farmland, in silos and barns on the fringes of humanity but also buried within its agricultural practices, and so they can tell us specific things about the extent to which plastic-coated fertilizers and pesticides, plastics in irrigation systems, and in certain mulches move from soils into the plants that mice and rats and voles feed on, and then end up inside the digestive systems of their Tytonid predator. Potentially effecting them and their ecosystems in ways we don’t yet know.
Change. Change change change change.
Lauren Oya Olamina, the main character of Octavia Butler’s sci-fi novel Parable of the Sower, which explores the importance of things like resiliency, adaptability, and community, especially in the face of apocalypse, claims that “The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”
Last week a Cooper’s hawk landed in the shellbark hickory in front of the house. It was chased there by some small, mobbing bird. Cooper’s hawks are lithe, acrobatic hawks with shale grey wings and flat heads and orange eyes. They have adapted well to urbanization. They don’t mind living in neighborhoods alongside people. This is the case for many raptors. Species like great horned owls, red-shouldered hawks, vultures, barred owls—all are alright with living alongside humanity, as long as we keep around the trees they are fond of nesting in, and the kinds of structures and vegetation their prey relies on for food and shelter.
The Cooper’s hawk found a gap in the leaves, the huge, deep green compound leaves that dress the hickory tree in July, to land on an exposed branch about three-quarters of the way up the tree. Sitting in the window seat, I was nearly eye-level with the hawk, and I could see it perfectly: its sunflower-yellow talons gripping the bark, its head turned to look over its shoulder to survey for its pursuer. After a minute or two it opened its wings and hopped nonchalantly to a branch further inside the tree where I couldn’t see.
I wondered if this Cooper’s hawk was related to the one that would stake out the bird feeders back during the winter. That hawk was just a kid. It still had its juvenile plumage—including a belly white and streaked with raindrops of brown—and it would often playfully twist its head completely upside down while it sat on the fence in the yard near the feeders.
I scrolled by a piece of art later the same day, while still sitting in the window seat. It was a digital painting of a person looking down at a blackbird on the ground. The bird in the art is dead. Its wings and tail are in disarray, its toes are curled, ribbons of pink and red spill from its chest. The person wears an oversized dark green jacket, has one hand in the front pocket of their jeans, another loosely clenched and hanging by their side. There is a watch on their wrist. The expression on their face is unreadable in a very full, private, human way. The description of the piece: ‘recognition of self, or whatever.’
I am also reading a memoir right now, about a professor and falconer in Cambridge who once trained and lived with a goshawk. ‘I’ve made a hawk part of a human life, and a human life part of a hawk’s,’ says Helen Macdonald in H Is for Hawk. ‘And it has made the hawk a million times more complicated and full of wonder to me.’ Despite their hatred of killing things, Helen worked together with Mabel, their hawk, to hunt animals like pheasants and rabbits.
I was happy for Mabel’s success and I mourned the individual rabbit. Kneeling by it’s corpse I’d feel a sharp awareness of my edges. The rain prickling on my collar. A pain in one knee. The scratches on my legs and arms from pushing myself through a hedge that had not hurt until now. And a sharp, wordless comprehension of my own mortality. 'Yes, I will die.'
The memoir also recounts parts of the life of T.H. White, the author of the novel series The Once and Future King that popularized the modern version of the legend of Merlin and King Arthur. He too trained a goshawk, back in the 1930s. He said that training a goshawk was like training a person that was not a human, but a hawk.
I don’t like killing things either, not even bugs. Neither does my sister or my partner. And all three of us can recall times when we’ve encountered something dead on the sidewalk—when we’ve been ourselves the one looking down. It’s worse when it occurs at an inopportune time. Coming upon a felled bumblebee when final exams are bearing down, or finding a flicker—a turtle—a frog—that’s been hit by a car when imprisoned in the hell of job-searching. For me, it’s as if the world, already tinged with misery, sends a reminder of the biggest misery, and it provokes an internal, helpless, wailing sorrow, one fanned by an already volatile mental state. To think of any complicated and wonderful thing vanishing is miserable. The abrupt reminder that something seemingly inviolable can be removed from existence without warning is affronting, terrifying. I recognize myself, I feel my edges, I see a person like and unlike me.
A world where death looms is destined to always be a mess. It will be a flurry of desperation and survival tactics, no matter how far removed humans think they get from the kinds of struggles of the spotted owl and the barred owl, the dynamics of native North American plants and honeysuckle. The truth is that we are not far removed at all. We evolved to be different people, to do many different things, but to ultimately live ephemeral lives together on, as scientist Helen Czerski puts it, “the only place we’re ever going to be.” I am introduced to a bird and I realize I am meeting a fleeting inhabitant of Earth I know quite little about—and I realize I should know more. Because we’re here together for the moment.
Sometime in July I weighed Hera myself for the first time. Had her step off my glove onto the scale-perch and then step back up. She did both without complaint or resistance. Perhaps she was in a better mood that day, perhaps she simply couldn’t wait to get into her water bath to quench the heavy, humid heat of the summer day. I am still a beginner, am just starting to know the personalities of these birds, their body language, their facial expressions. I am immersing myself in their lives slowly, patiently, so that I can learn how best to work alongside them. But my closeness to them has already altered me. The hawks in my neighborhood are people I’m in this life with, the owls across the country creatures I understand to be doing to an extent what I am doing, under a sky of darkness pricked with light.
Information for this article was obtained from:
✼ Western screech-owl occupancy in the face of an invasive predator ✼ Flammulated owl distribution and habitat associations during the breeding season ✼ What An Owl Knows ✼ Comprehensive molecular phylogeny of barn owls and relatives (Family: Tytonidae), and their six major Pleistocene radiations ✼ Extensive paraphyly in the typical owl family (Strigidae) ✼ A VERY IMPORTANT SPRING PSA ✼ H is For Hawk ✼ Parable of the Sower ✼ The Blue Machine ✼ recognition of self or w/e ✼