What Does The Red-Shouldered Hawk Have To Do With Resistance?

This morning, for me, a lot.

I woke up early this morning, inspired by the Indivisible meeting I attended online last night. So much truth, focus, and inspiration for moving forward with action in response to the criminal, cruel, and chaotic behaviors our current administration is performing every single day and night right now.

Calling my senators and representatives was heartening; all voicemail boxes were full. But I dialed through their local NC offices until I found open voicemail boxes for each of them and left my messages.

Morning is when I try to get each of our three dogs out for individual off leash farm romps. I get triple the movement and they each get custom time. Baloo is the wild man Cardigan Welsh Corgi who runs the entire front pasture, monitoring everything he can see and hear as he goes.

Clementine the Golden Retriever goes joyfully forward, getting “stuck in the weeds” with smelling. On her best days she does not dig a hole! We’ve been working on recall during important scent moments and she’s doing really well. I try to allow lots of sniff time and she seems to understand that we can make that trade.

Bear is our senior (15 years old in June) Pembroke Welsh Corgi. He is a sweetheart and he is now partially blind, partially deaf, and living with dementia and arthritis. But his spirit remains strong. He needs the ability to be center stage on his romps, with no torpedo action from Baloo the Bossy, or potential resource guarding (she thinks the world is hers!) from Clementine. Bear putters along and lives in the present moment. He sometimes gets confused about where he is and I have to get in his line of vision and move close to remind him. He’s with me! That is his joy and he always comes running when he sees me.

During the last walk of this morning one of our resident red-shouldered hawks flew above, making the same loud call repeatedly. Instead of the usual kee-rah call flyover, the bird perched in one of the huge and still bare tulip poplars and called over and over and over again, loudly, insistently.

I stopped walking and looked up. The hawk called again, circling above my head and then flying off over the adjacent 11-acre wood which we call Crow Forest.

Back in the house, I looked up the red-shouldered hawk to remind myself of its symbolism. The Cherokee believe this is a bird that represents vision. Change and transformation. Focus and strength. Whatever you’re thinking of, seeing the red-shouldered hawk means it will come to pass.

I will tell you that I was thinking of the people in this country rising up, holding democracy tightly to our hearts, and pushing out the awfulness that is in our White House today.

I will also tell you that the Cornell Bird Lab determined in their research that red-shouldered hawks primarily eat snakes. That says it all.

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