Inaugural Flight

When I first moved to this upper Midwest plains area I was nonplussed.  The land was so flat, so featureless.  I said that it looked like God had simply put down his thumb and pressed hard.  I thought I was clever.  I got a lot of mileage out of that line.  The people who thought it was funny either didn’t live around here or lived around here and thought that the land was flat and featureless. 

That was a long time ago.  Over the years I have retrained my eye, my mind, and my language.  One of my students, Seamus MacDonald, wrote in an eco-journal for one of my classes about hunting for elk in Montana.  He said that “the only way to spot an elk that isn't moving in a wooded area is to look for its shape.”  He talked about looking for elk-shaped logs, elk-shaped brush, and elk-shaped lumps of land.  I’ve learned a lot from his observations.  I am now pretty good at picking out brown shapes in brown landscapes.  And green shapes in green landscapes.  But how can one hone language to make something recognizably elk-shaped?  I don’t know, but I am ready to try.

There is a Northern Harrier in this photograph.  It isn’t easy to see; the photograph isn’t that good.  Look for a hawk that is Northern Harrier-shaped.  From a distance the Northern Harrier looks like one of our Midwestern crop duster planes skimming perilously close to the earth and then popping up like a winged cork at a boundary line before cascading back earthward.  Sometimes Harriers pull in one wing and do barrel rolls over the fields.  The bird's Latin name is Circus cyaneus: circus for the "circle" that describes its flight habits and cyaneus for cyan, the steely blue color of the male Harrier.  The female is a rich brown.

A unique feature of Harriers is the disk-shaped arrangement of feathers around their eyes and ear openings.  While other birds of prey rely almost exclusively on sight for hunting, the Harrier is like an owl in that it also relies on sound that is directed to their ears by the facial disks of feathers. I once watched a pair of Northern Harriers in central Montana work a series of fields amidst a constellation of Short-eared Owls.  The two species hunt in similar fashion, skating over the seed heads of the grasses and sieving sound with their moon-shaped faces.  The slightest animal movement glisters on their retinas, and they plunge feet first on a mouse or snake.

The bird's common name, "Harrier," has roots in the old English "herigan," which means to harass or plunder, lay waste, slay, or hunt down.  A group of Harriers is known as a "swarm" or "harassment." "Harrow" is a by-form of harrier, as the OED claims, which means to plunder, sack, spoil, lay waste, ravage, or destroy.  A harrow is, of course, also an implement for breaking the soil. Anyone who lives on or near a farm knows what a harrow is.  Harrows come in many forms, but they all break up, pulverize, scatter, stir, root up, or disturb in some way.

Both "harrier" and "harrow" have violent connotations and, interestingly, seem to describe more aptly the human marauders, despoilers, and monsters of the ages.  That is a lot of freight to lay upon the sleek, buoyant hawk with the disk of feathers around the owl-like eyes.  Yet in "harrier" and "harrow" are suggestions, too, as to how the bird operates.  A Harrier will ply the grasslands all day looking for prey-shaped creatures, listening for prey-shaped noises. The prairie churns in the wind like those sinuous, rippling meadows that resemble the sea in Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House and the famous mower poems.  The hawk chooses.  It courses steadily across the inland sea of fields.  It scans, builds up distinctions, and selects the mouse-like shape from the water-like grass.  It plunges.

The first Northern Harrier that I saw this spring was on Easter Sunday in the Sheyenne grasslands of North Dakota.  She was flying into a 40 mph wind, shoulders twitching slightly to maintain a steady hover above a marshy slough.  As the hawk harried the field, the human violence in the old word that names her fell away like a husk. Grace and efficiency remained.

Writing about the relationship between humans and the natural world means being a deft and careful harrower of the word as well as the world.  It means pulling back when acts of naming and violence become indistinguishable.  That is the purpose of this blog:  to watch, to hover, to select, to connect.  My eyesight isn't what it used to be, but I can spot brown shapes in brown landscapes.  I can't hear shapes the way that the Northern Harrier does, but I will be a harrier and harrower of words and hope that the violence inherent in the act falls away like a husk more often than not.