True story from right about 15 years ago.

Morning of the Hawk

Nashville’s Twenty-First Avenue serves as the eastern boundary of Vanderbilt University’s main campus. Across the street lies Vanderbilt’s George Peabody College of Education campus. A block or two east of that lie several small apartment buildings. I spent most of my years in Nashville living in one or another of these.

Each of my three off-campus residences was about ten to fifteen minutes’ walk from my job at Vanderbilt’s main library. Usually I extended my morning walk to work to a good half hour by taking an indirect route around the beautiful Peabody campus and its environs. At lunch time I would go for a walk on the Main Campus. In the evening I would return home, again usually by an indirect route, or perhaps run some errands on foot.

One morning in the spring of 2004, a few days before Easter, something impelled me to change my morning routine on the spur of the moment. I headed straight for the main campus and began strolling around there. This was something that I virtually never did at that time of morning. Why did I do that? I couldn’t say.

It was a good morning. A very low mist lay here and there across the campus lawns. The mostly clear sky promised that the morning cool would give way to a mild, pleasant day.

I began to notice plastic Easter eggs lying here and there in the grass. Who in the world would have scattered those around a university campus? My curiosity got the best of me. I took one of the eggs, and found inside a piece of candy and an invitation to the campus Methodist student group’s upcoming Easter morning service. I appreciated the invitation and its novel presentation, though I still planned to go to my church downtown for Easter instead.

My walk meandered over to a large dorm quad called Kissam. As I approached Kissam along a stretch of ornamental metal fence, an odd sight brought me up short. Who in the world, I asked myself, would stick a large stuffed bird on top of that fence?

I’d no sooner thought this when I realized that this “stuffed” bird was the real thing. Several years earlier a pair of hawks had made news by successfully nesting and raising their young on Vanderbilt’s urban university campus. They and their descendants had been coming back to campus ever since. I had often seen them perched atop the cross on the steeple of the Divinity School’s chapel. That was usually about as close a look as I got.

Now one of those hawks was perched on a fence, its fierce raptor face virtually at eye-level with me, only a few yards from where I stood. I froze in place and eyed it.

The hawk had its eye on something else. It was tracking a squirrel that was scrambling up the trunk of a tree a few feet away. I had just realized what the hawk was looking at when it pounced. It missed. The squirrel scrambled away to cover.

The hawk, giving that one up as a bad job, flew off in the opposite direction. I watched it skim across the lawn only a few feet above the ground. It disappeared into the mist. I did not see it again that morning.

This was only my second close encounter with a Vanderbilt hawk. A year or two earlier I was approaching the eastern edge of Peabody when I saw a squirrel on the ground nearby. This was hardly remarkable. Vanderbilt is notorious for its squirrel population; I’ve counted as many as fifty or sixty on a single walk across campus.

It would have taken me only a couple of seconds to move beyond sight of that squirrel. Before that time could elapse, I saw a hawk swoop down and carry the squirrel away. One moment the squirrel was there—the next it wasn’t. I stood for a moment with my mouth open, wondering whether I had really seen what I just saw. Ever since that time I’ve had a much more vivid understanding of just what the old expression “one fell swoop” really means.

Late that year I left Nashville and returned to rural Arkansas. Birds of prey are not too unusual a sight here. It is ironic, then, that my two closest and best sightings of them took place on that university campus in the middle of a major city.

I still can’t say why I suddenly changed my morning routine that spring day. I’m inclined to suspect, though, that God gave me some kind of a little nudge in the direction of that hawk’s morning hunting ground. Sometimes he seems to make a point of showing me wonders of creation like that. I’m always glad to see them.

I’ve thought of that hawk encounter quite a bit lately. The memory of blessings like that, and the hope of getting to see more like it in the future, is a welcome source of reassurance in troubled times, and an antidote to troubled thoughts.

About once every two years I try to take a week’s vacation to return to Nashville. I spend the days there exploring old sights and meeting old friends, seeing what has changed and what hasn’t. Of course I always visit Vanderbilt’s campus and any old colleagues I can find there. Usually on my last evening in town I will take a last stroll across campus, soaking in the familiar campus ambience for one last time before I have to leave it behind for two more years.

A couple of years ago I was doing this when I saw a large pair of wings swoop down out of a tree a short distance in front of me. The bird sailed along the sidewalk for a few moments before disappearing. The sighting lasted just long enough, with just enough evening light, for me to make certain that it was a hawk. It felt like I’d had a chance to renew one more old acquaintance. I hope that that hawk and its descendants will grace Vanderbilt’s campus for many years to come.