A Drama in the Woods

I was just in the right place at the right time to see it, and it didn’t last long. A hawk came out of the timber and passed across a small opening in the woods with a cluster of oak leaves in his talons, pursued by four or five screeching small birds.

I watched the hawk so closely I didn’t pay much attention to the smaller birds. He flew across a little opening with those birds all over him, just screeching and diving at him with a vengeance. Then they all disappeared into the brush on the other side of the opening, where the drama continued out of sight.

This black vulture is migrating north, coming into the Ozarks in large numbers.  Landowners will learn

It wasn’t the leaves in his talons the smaller birds were so incensed about; it was what was also in them. The hawk obviously had snatched a young bird from a limb, and took the whole nest in his hasty attack. A tragic story, if you look at it from the standpoint of a mother bird. But if you were the hawk, it wouldn’t seem so awful. Maybe the hawk was feeding its own young with the fledgling it found.

In this day and age, you’d find the hawk thought of as a villain, with great sympathy for the weaker prey, regardless of what it was…. a rabbit, a young bird or squirrel. The sight of a two-week-old hawk fledgling being eaten by a fox would reverse everything. Then the hawk, losing her baby to the rotten old fox, would be looked upon with sympathy.

It is how it is; there is no good or bad in nature, and it never changes. That is a hard thing for many to accept. I remember when my daughters were little girls; how I tried to explain nature to them, and yet, protect them from the harshness of it. We’d be on a trip somewhere, and one of my girls would notice a dead rabbit in the road. They’d ask their mother if it was a baby rabbit, or a mama rabbit and she’d tell them ‘no, it was just a bad ol’ daddy rabbit’. That seemed to help. If it was a ‘bad old daddy’ as it soon became every time they saw an animal dead on the highway, it wasn’t quite as sad as if it were a mama or a baby.

I even learned to help. I would point out that the dead raccoon on the highway had probably just staggered out of the pool hall half drunk and had been chasing a little helpless bullfrog across the highway when a semi nailed him. That way it sounded like he had it coming and the girls wouldn’t be so sad.

In time, when they grew old enough, I took it upon myself to explain to them that among wild animals, things were far different than with humans. I told them how the hawk would only have two or three young ones in a year, or perhaps over two years, while a mother rabbit might have as many as 100, and couldn’t even name all of them.

God had it figured out so both would survive as a species. One species was given reproductive potential and the other given biotic potential. In other words, if a species had great survival chances, it lived longer and didn’t need to produce lots of young. If a species individuals didn’t survive long, like the rabbit, then the creator gave it the ability to produce many many offspring.

It is almost beyond understanding, even when you have seen as much, and learned as much as I have in my life of studying and experiencing the outdoors. I still hate to see a fawn drug down by a bobcat, and hear him bleating a plea for survival, knowing his fate is to feed her and a litter of wild kittens somewhere beneath the root wad of a fallen tree. I wish to heavens that the old cat would just feed them woodrats. But shucks, a mother rat does not look at her young as being any less wonderful than a fawn. Only us humans do that.

I can live with what I have seen in the wild, knowing there are all those surviving fawns which will become little more than grown fender-benders someday, or subjects of a photo for some grinning antler hunter who comes to the woods one week a year with a high-powered rifle.

For me though, it is even more difficult to understand what mankind is becoming. Many times in the woods, I have felt the Creator with me while I watched His work go on before me. There is no natural change there, and no ‘diversity and inclusion.’

In the woods there is no gray area, it is all black and white. It isn’t that way in the mess in which men have created. How have so few convinced so many to embrace a path to oblivion? No right… no wrong!

In those woods that remain as God made them, becoming harder to find as each year passes, new species coming into the Ozarks never make things better. The armadillo and the black vulture prove that. But the native wild creatures, remain exactly what they were a thousand years ago. It is a lesson men should learn from nature, but will not. If God did create the earth, why didn’t he make diversity among men a reality then??? He didn’t… Think about that. In the meantime, I will leave what is coming to God. In the woods, I won’t shoot the hawk that catches a rabbit, but I am going to shoot every black vulture and armadillo I come across!