A Raptor on the Road

I live on the edge of the suburbs. My home is decidedly suburban, but walk for five minutes and all you can see are rice fields and bamboo groves. Walk another ten minutes and you will be in a protected forest, what in Australia we call a National Park. This means that the road I ride to work on has a mix of the ubiquitous dead cats and some more rural victims of the traffic, such as squirrels and tanuki and the odd snake. There are signs warning of wild boar and monkeys, but I’ve never seen either. This morning there was a hawk on the road. It was on the small side, quite young I would guess, probably killed while enjoying some carrion. It’s never nice to see road kill, but sight of what was left of the hawk seemed particularly sad to me. They are such perfect creatures of the air, so light, agile, and effortless in the sky. For such a creature to be crushed against the hard ground, made into a weighty, damp clump that will only be pressed further and further into the road as each subsequent car rolls over it, seems a cruelly unfitting death.

So here are some weightless hawks, as they should be.