Even though we live in the woods, I do not expect to meander into the backyard and find a hawk chick toddling towards me.
“Are you my mother?”
Yes, I know there is a Red-Tailed Hawk nesting in a tree just off the backyard, but I wasn’t expecting to find a chick on the ground. The chicks are supposed to be in the nest, not wandering around the woods.
Mama Hawk in the nest last spring, when we could still see it. (Hooray for zoom lenses!)
Dealing with the unexpected
We don’t usually meddle with Mother Nature, but this was an exception. As you can see, this little guy doesn’t have feathers on his head yet:
Baby hawks are cute, in an ugly-duckling sort of way.
He’s not old enough to fly, his nest is 60 feet up a large oak tree, and there are foxes, owls, and other predators that would consider tender young hawk a tasty meal. This is a problem.
A call to the Game Commission directed us to Red Creek Wildlife Center. A helpful volunteer explained that our chick was not likely to survive without intervention. At his direction, we caught the chick in a cardboard box (not difficult, the little guy didn’t seem afraid of us, although maybe he was just too weak to run away) and took it to the center. A call a few days later verified that the chick is likely to survive. The center has good success raising hawks and reintroducing them to the wild. Hooray.
Life is full of surprises.
Some are big, others only the size of a baby hawk. But large or small, surprises tend to throw a wrench in our carefully planned agendas. How do you react when life drops something unexpected in your path?
Do you embrace whatever comes, enjoying the novelty of each new situation? Do you face the unexpected philosophically, realizing that change is a part of life whether we like it or not? Or do you get frustrated because there is no room for the unexpected in your carefully laid plans?
When you turn around and find a baby hawk gazing up at you, it’s no great sacrifice to ditch the to-do list, but not all surprises are so charming. Sometimes they are downright unpleasant—like a flat tire, a traffic jam, or a trip to the Urgent Care.
Is it possible to embrace even the less-than-delightful surprises of life with a modicum of anticipation? I’m not talking about the really nasty bumps, the ones that throw our lives completely out of kilter, but those everyday sort of surprises—is it possible to look upon them as more than just annoyances?
If we choose to look for the silver lining in each cloud that rains on our plans, I bet we’ll find a lot more to be happy about than if we refuse to look.
What about you? What helps you deal with the unexpected in your life?
