Laying stones is solitary work. Whether you’re building a wall or a walk, it’s one stone at a time. Eye the pile, choose one rock for possible fit, try every angle, then more than likely put it back and choose another. Sight and touch are fully engage, but rocks have no odor, and nothing is more silent than stone. That was my task on a recent afternoon, in this case building a pathway of basalt to the upper room, the space above the dug-into-the-hill garage accessible only from up the hill. On hands and knees, I concentrated myopically on the task at hand, oblivious to all overhead–until the air was pierced by the scream of a red-tailed hawk.

Any birdcall is a signal to stop whatever I’m doing and take a break and a look, even if it’s a robin or a dove. But of all our birds, the red-tail’s cry is perhaps most dramatic, splitting the air like a steam locomotive’s shriek. True, blue jays are capable of a fair imitation; they’ve fooled me more than once. But this cry came from high in the firmament. I had no doubt what I’d heard. It didn’t take long to spot the hawk circling directly overhead.

I put my tools aside and sprawled on my back in the grass for a better point of view, a perspective that would not strain my neck. Now I saw that there were actually two hawks, a pair gliding together on the updraft above the bluff. Round and round they went, drifting up the bluff on the wind. Focused intently as I was on the pair, I didn’t see the eagle until he entered the red-tails’ arc.

The bald eagle was engaged in the same activity as the smaller birds of prey, riding the updraft, searching for dinner. But then I realized that the eagle had something else in mind. Each revolution brought him closer to the hawks. His circle was wider, but his flight was faster, and he was closing in. Presumably the eagle saw the smaller raptors as competition for whatever rodents or rabbits might be exposed, and he was the biggest bird on the block.

But with greater size and speed comes diminished agility. The four-foot wingspan of the red-tails enabled them to easily evade the advancing eagle, which though not fully mature, had a wingspan a third wider than that of the hawks. The buteos didn’t seem especially concerned about the larger bird, but neither were they eager for a confrontation with the ruler of our skies. Gradually the eagle pushed them with the wind, and up the bluff they drifted, leaving behind any unlucky mammals the eagle-eyed monarch of the bluff might spy.

–Jerry

To read more from Jerry Wilson, check out Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff.