Death as a New Beginning: The Art of Possibility

One of the side effects of humans and wild animals sharing the same environment is the often inevitable collision between vehicles and animals. I have personally run into two deer. One of those encounters almost totalled my car and killed the deer. I still cringe when I remember the thumping sound of hitting something and the sense of guilt and complete helplessness when I realized what had happened.
Over the years, I have seen almost any kind of roadkill one can imagine living in these wild mountainous parts of Appalachia: squirrels, racoons, possums, red fox, deer (always deer), scavenger birds that get hit while feasting on other roadkill carcasses such as vultures, hawks, owls, even a bald eagle. I’ve heard of motorcyclists hitting cattle on the road… but that’s another story altogether.
There are a number of “Roadkill Festivals” in the area which feature any kind of meat imaginable (bear, snake, racoon, squirrel, turtle, etc), even some that is verifiably not local (alligator). I was told that the food cannot come from actual roadkill due to food safety concerns. I know, the vegetarians and vegans among you may just decide this post is no longer tolerable….but hang on…

This post is actually dedicated to a beautiful hawk I found lying by the side of a road. It was hit by a vehicle while it was feeding on a possum carcass. I stopped my car and walked up to it. It was stiff and very dead, so I took it home to take pictures. And, I also had additional plans for this bird that I’ll talk about later.

You can see remnants of the bird’s last meal.

The usual occupants of our porch, semi-feral cats, were rather suspicious of this large bird:

I consulted with a local bird expert and he thought that this bird may be a juvenile red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis). The red tails are very common in our area, and spend the winter here. Mature birds have beautiful, rusty red tail feathers (hence the name, red tailed). This one had not earned his colors yet. These hawks are 19-25 inches (48 – 63 cm) tall. Their white breasts are streaked bandlike with brown spots.

The talons are long and curved and look very intimidating:

I heard from someone who works at a Wild Bird Refuge Center that hawks have so much grasping power in their talons that they could crush the bones in your hand. That’s why people working with birds know to put on very thick and highly protective leather gloves. For a view of beautiful hawks and the glove needed to work with them, see Cindy Knoke’s post on a magnificent, if unusually colored, red-tail hawk.

When I find dead birds that are still in decent shape, I usually take them to a local woman, Judy Skeen, who creates beautiful sketches and paintings of birds and other animals. She keeps the birds in her freezer until she finds time to paint them and then resurrects them as if they were still alive. Here are some examples of her bird sketches (unfortunately, her painting of MY hawk was recently donated to support a local wildlife center and I don’t have a photo of it).

Judy who is absolutely not interested in computers or blogs gave me permission to photograph these sketches and include them in this blog post:

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If I was a hawk who had to die prematurely as a roadkill, I probably wouldn’t mind ending up in Judy’s hands. Being eternalized on art paper and finding a place of honor on someone’s wall, or flying around in the blogosphere like this is not the same as being alive and lifting high up into the air currents but it beats the ditch by the side of the road.

This post was written in response to the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Beginning AND Ailsa’s Travel Theme: Possibility.