Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

In December 1978, Russ and I took a road trip to southeastern Texas. Starting on January 2, he had a meeting in Aransas, so we decided to make it into a birding and tent-camping trip up until then. We followed I-35 from where it starts in Duluth to where it ends in Laredo. While we were still on the interstate, about 30 miles north of Laredo, I spotted out the window my lifer Harris’s Hawk, #283 on my life list. It’s a spectacular bird, with rich rusty legs and large rusty shoulders, a white-tipped tail, and white undertail coverts, all of which made it easy to identify at 55 mph—the national speed limit back then. I saw Harris’s Hawks several more times on that trip and other trips to south Texas, and have also seen them in Arizona and New Mexico here in the United States, and in Mexico and Costa Rica .

Of all the birds of prey, Harris’s Hawks are notable for their extraordinarily sociable natures. They hunt cooperatively—I’ve seen that a few times in nature, and also saw it on an episode of Wild Kratts, my grandson Walter’s current favorite TV show. That sociable nature is so innate that when Harris’s Hawks are raised by humans or even taken into captivity, they bond easily. Many people believe that legends and rituals regarding the Thunderbird or Sacred Bird of several Native American societies are derived from the people’s interactions with Harris’s Hawk. The charming Kratt Brothers were shown handling Harris’s Hawks. They seem clearly delighted with all their animal encounters, but this seemed even more special and charming, probably because you just don’t expect hawks to be so personally engaging.

I’ve been thinking about Harris’s Hawks a lot recently, because so much attention has suddenly been focused on the wonderful, Oscar-winning movie, Hamnet. I read the book several years ago, and remembered that Agnes, the main female protagonist, had a falcon in the story. The book made it clear it was a Eurasian Kestrel. But in the movie, even as they used the term “falcon” at least once, the bird portraying the kestrel was a Harris’s Hawk. I of course noticed this—how can a birder possibly look at any recognizable bird and not know what it is?

Movie producers are seldom birders, and fact-checking about bird issues in TV and movie production is woefully inadequate. Even Russ noticed when Special Agent Alden Parker, on NCIS, showed a photo of a male Ruby-throated Hummingbird but called it a “she.” Since the word “it” works perfectly fine as a pronoun for birds, specifying that this one was a female was simply unacceptable. And it drives me nuts when a soundtrack includes species of birds that could not possibly be heard where the program is ostensibly taking place. NCIS actually does a very good job with that.

But in the case of Hamnet, I instantly understood why they made the choice to use a hawk, not a falcon, and a Harris’s Hawk at that—not only in an entirely different taxonomic order but also impossible to be found anywhere near England in the time of Shakespeare.

Falconers have trained plenty of birds of prey for use in public performances and in movies and TV. But raptors are not like dogs—in just about all cases, well-trained raptors respond to just one handler. A falcon might do some cool flight maneuvesr to communicate that Timmy fell down the well, but no way would it then rush to the rescued boy and give him a slurpy kiss. Performing on a movie set is stressful for just about all birds of prey; a falcon could deal with this if the hander it was bonded to was the only human it had to deal with. The Humane Society monitors animal use in movies now, and I’m sure they watch out for how comfortable birds of prey are with their handlers.

But because of their intrinsic social natures, Harris’s Hawks that have bonded with one person can fairly easily adapt to being handled by others—an important point when a bird must convincingly interact in a gentle, benign way with an actor. So although it was momentarily disconcerting for me to see Agnes holding a Harris’s Hawk rather than a Eurasian Kestrel, I quickly understood that this was a good thing for the well-being of the bird and Jessie Buckley, and that the well-being of both the bird and human was far, far more important than strict ornithological accuracy. Indeed, ornithological accuracy extends beyond taxonomy and biogeography—knowing the name and range of a bird is nothing to knowing the behaviors and quirks that make it unique.

But naturally, ever since the movie came out, some pedantic birders have been ridiculing the use of a New World hawk where an Old World falcon was called for. The bird was one important element in the book and the movie, but how could anyone be sidetracked for more than a moment by something so relatively insignificant in the face Hamnet’s emotional power and intensity? It was as perfect a movie adaptation of a book as I’ve ever seen, Harris’s Hawk and all.