Re-platforming, part three

An ownership position.

I.

The death of a trained hawk is always a surprise yet never unexpected.

I experience the potential for this disaster as a tension near the base of my skull. It tightens every minute of every flight and only loosens, somewhat, afterward.

By the midpoint between two hunts, it may diminish nearly to nothing, but it always cinches back.

When a hawk is killed, something between you breaks free. What floats away, like a stray boat in a stream, is your connection to any future with that bird.

The next moment; later that evening; tomorrow morning; the following week—every subsequent experience you expected spools out faster than you can pull it back.

I’ve lost one hawk this year so far, a jack merlin named Artie.

He was trapped in October on the Gulf Coast, lured by a tethered sparrow into a net. What he expected upon capture didn’t happen: He survived, and even the sparrow lived. Food appeared soon after. It was good. The days took shape, and they molded him.

By early January, Artie was fully re-formed, folded like a paper boat into the familiar pattern of falconry. He was, to stretch the metaphor to breaking, an eager and stylish little sailor when a passing Cooper’s hawk sunk his ship.

II.

One of the ways you know you own something is if you’re permitted to sell it.

Not all things sell so well. Some commodities are too common, too hard to package, or too big to fit in the trunk.

Grief is one of those.

When I posted to Facebook about Artie’s death, hundreds of friends responded, and many shared the post. Because we’re falconers (and other kinds of animal nut), the news of my bird’s loss resonated with readers. People wrote, expressed sadness; sent good vibes and well-intended (but tardy) advice; told stories with similar endings.

And somewhere behind the scenes, sales registered. A very particular kind of grief transmuted into common forms of money, none of which accrued to me.

Not that I would have wanted it.

It was Facebook’s shareholders who asserted ownership of my grief that day, sweeping it up into a maelstrom of content generation and parsing it out with algorithms to squeeze from it every possible advertising dollar.

Fractions of a dollar, probably.

I have another hawk: She’s Coco, the kestrel. She’s a champion performer on her day (an expert slayer of starlings), and pretty good on the off days, too.

She’s incredibly annoying at times—a troublesome traveler, a shredder of newspaper, and an hysterical personality in the wake of a larger hawk’s passing overhead.

I will likely keep her until she’s dead. With some luck, that will be years from now. She’s five and has at least as many good years left, if we can dodge all the hawks and cars and window panes between now and her natural end.

There will be grief in that, however it happens. I may write about it, or not. But I will own it, whatever it’s worth. It will be mine

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