Day of the Raptor

The robin was staring at me meaningfully and Mohican Blue (the feistiest of the blue tits) was alarming and bobbing in front of me. I was looking for a cat and then I looked up. Hawk. Watching. I had seen feathers on the path and knew someone had died yesterday. The blue tits seemed to expect me to scare the hawk away… and I was there thinking… I feed the small birds…. and thus, well, I feed the sparrow hawk… is that right? Is that how the thing works? Or do I have a duty of care to the tits? Or, in making them more able to survive the winter and less likely to be too weak to escape, am I contributing to the hawk’s precarity? What am I here?

I was there, agog, maybe ten minutes, the small birds bouncing and alarming. The hawk watching. Dispassionate. Unwavering.

I had been reading Val Plumwood's Eye of the Crocodile… and I thought, yes, the tits are food… but how do I be food not supreme determiner of who gets food?

I walked up the path toward the house and flushed the starlings out of the front lilac and there - SWOOP - parabola of predation - speed and curves and grace and claws and glory and  utter disregard for the debates in my mind - and a crash through the bushes and gone… and weeeee weeee… Mohican Blue whistling…. grief?

I walked  back to the back lilac to see Mohican Blue. And he was now able to go to the feeder. He ate suet. No more alarm calls.

What happened? Did a tit die or is the hawk hungry?