`The Sweep of His Reign'

An excited colleague on the first floor called Thursday morning to report a “big bird” perched on the roof of our building. My officemate grabbed his camera and we ran out in the rain to see a hawk posed like a gargoyle on the northwest corner, three stories up. He appeared disheveled, probably because of the rain, but no less fierce and stony, a reproach to prey and lesser predators alike. In profile, he made me think of a cartoonist’s caricature of Samuel Beckett.

With no ornithologist or even a well-informed bird watcher in our midst, the most confident among us identified the visitor as an osprey, Pandion haliaetus, what I’ve always called a fish hawk. About 10 years ago, in the company of an ichthyologist-turned-ornithologist (he switched mid-career when he developed a formaldehyde allergy), I watched an osprey drop out of the sky like a streamlined rock and disappear beneath the surface of Collins Lake, in Scotia, N.Y., just across the Mohawk River from Schenectady. Seconds later, concentric ripples still moving, the bird shot out of the water with a fish in its talons. I’ve never seen beauty and savagery so perfectly wedded. In “Sounds,” the fourth chapter of Walden, Thoreau witnesses a similar scene:

“As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half-hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the country.”

Thoreau, typically, downplays the drama, fitting predator and prey into a larger cycle of activity. “Dimples” makes an excellent verb. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “tantivy” as “a rapid gallop; a ride at this pace,” and cites Thoreau’s 1854 usage. For its etymology, the OED reports “origin obscure: ? echoic, representing the sound of a horse's feet.” The only echo I hear is of Oliver “Tantivy” Mucker-Maffick, a character in Gravity’s Rainbow.

I wish we had seen the hawk take off from its perch but the rain fell harder and the lens on my officemate’s camera fogged up. The three or four pictures he took are blurry and turn the bird’s brilliant white breast into a washed-out gray, though you get a sense of the cool dignity Melville described in “The Man-of-War Hawk”:

“No arrow can reach him; nor thought can attain
To the placid supreme in the sweep of his reign.”