Cowboy Confessional

As an ex-cowboy living in a major metropolis, I admit to the vastness of my ignorance on all thing urban.

Urbanites should do likewise about nature.

I slid my pick-up truck into a parking lot this afternoon and came across what was to me a sight familiar. Between rows of parked cars a hawk was busily pecking away at an unhappy pigeon. As with most hungry predators, the hawk was not waiting for the pigeon to first pass away.

I stayed in my truck.

With feathers flying from each peck, and the pigeon slowly losing the strength to struggle, I knew not to disrupt this part of nature’s perpetual recycling program. The hawk was hungry, but not stupid. Left alone he would rapidly do enough damage to the former statue defacer to enable a relatively merciful exit. On the pigeon was incapacitated, I would be able to slip out of my truck while the hawk dined. If I exited early, the hawk might spook and abandoned its mortally wounded but yet alive victim to suffer an excruciating end.

The Chinese family wasn’t this well educated on the mechanics of nature.

Fascinated by slow motion carnage this pack of immigrants, mother fetching a camera from he bag, approached the hawk with inconsideration known only to tourists and other pests. The hawk arched its wings, became as threatening as it could, but eventually fled in the face of the larger and oddly vertical interloper.

The pigeon was left to die … slowly.

I thought about killing the pigeon to take it out of its misery. I thought about killing the Chinese woman to her out of my misery. Instead I waited. After many sad looks at the expiring pigeon, the immigrant family left and the hawk — who I noticed had taken perch in a nearby tree — returned and finished the job.

A note to my urban friends: Don’t interfere with nature unless you face an emergency. Gaia has worked out gaming processes quite well over many millennia. Animals do their work with necessary expediency. Stand at a respectable distance and let nature take its perpetually fatal course.

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