Learning to fly on your own

For the past few seasons, we have watched a pair of Cooper's hawks across the ravine and creek bed that is part of our backyard.

They are beautiful, fierce birds, so fierce that we paper trained our little dogs when they were snack-sized puppies, transitioning their house training outdoors when they were bigger. Cooper's hawks usually go after other birds, field mice, moles and the occasional snake. But from our big sun porch window, we saw a squirrel versus hawk battle one day high in the tree tops. I did not see the outcome, but it didn't look good for squirrel.

As I was getting ready to head to the hospital to see our youngest daughter and new grandson, I was drawn to the window by the cries of those Cooper's hawks. It is something to see as one by one, the little ones are nudged carefully from the nest by one parent while the other parent flies, swooping under and calling out.

Within an hour, there were four smaller hawks in the air circling the field on the other side of our creek and with tentative changes in altitude and direction, and learning the finer points of ascending, diving and sticking those all important landings. When I came home, a little before sunset, the four little hawks were still flying with the parents nowhere to be found. I wondered where those fledglings would sleep, what they would find to eat and how soon they would be looking for partners and nesting on their own.

I would have liked to have borrowed some of the confidence and courage I saw in that family of hawks coming home from the hospital with our daughter, her husband and their sweet baby boy. Every aspect of a new baby going home feels like a nudge away from the safety of the doctors, nurses and techs and into the bewildered wilderness of inconsistent sleep cycles, feedings and the healing from an emergency c-section.

Being nudged out of a nest 30 or so feet off the ground with a pair of perfectly operational, even if untried, wings seems less daunting than all this new young human family has to figure out. Of course, I have yet to spot any grandparent hawks involved in flight training those fuzzy fledglings. This Nonni doesn't have wings, but I have felt like I have been walking on air since the moment I met little Jameson Gale.

Lori Law can be reached at lori@columbus.rr.com.