FLOPPY HATS AND NOTEPADS

Floppy Hats and Notepads

 The humans on the edge looked at the vulture.  Warm air blew over the river and up the cliff, and the vulture glided in circles above them.  The light of the sun glinted off the water below.  The humans did not see any other vulture at the moment.

 “Turkey vulture.” 

“Just a turkey vulture. What’s that? Twelve today?”

“I see something in the distance.  It may be a broad-winged, I think.” 

The turkey vulture looked down at the humans.  All of their eyes grew long, pointed at the thing in the distance.

Pakshi held his father’s hand as they walked to the cliff’s edge.  There was a fence at the edge and Pakshi thought it looked like a big balcony.  He wished he had binoculars.  The people on the cliff had binoculars and a few also had telescopes, like how pirates have.  Some of them stood on one side of the balcony and some of them stood on the other side.  The ones on the left wore floppy hats and had vests on top of bright shirts.  They looked at the distant sky and smiled and said “Ooh” and “Ah” and “Wow” a lot.  A few pointed cameras as long as the telescopes.  One of them seemed to be drawing.  Another lifted a camera as long as a telescope to her face and turned the lens, her mouth a little open, her tongue stuck out a little, her hat’s brim flopped onto the camera.  The ones on the other side wore white and light brown shirts and baseball caps.  Many of them carried notebooks and pens in their shirt pockets and one person stood next to a whiteboard with names on one side of it and numbers on the other side.  They also looked to the distant sky for a few minutes, with their binoculars or telescopes, wrote something down on their pad and said something to each other.

Pakshi watched a bird close above them all.  “Daddy, a red-faced hawk!” 

“That’s not a hawk, buddy. That’s a vulture.  We’re here to see hawks, and falcons, things like that; they’re going to blow your mind!”

A man with a notepad turned to his father.  “Kid’s first time at the Hawk Watch?  Perfect September weather.”

“Yeah, his - and my - first time here. He watches these birds on his tablet, and I always wanted to do this myself, so here we are.  It’s time we saw some real birds in action, right, buddy?” 

“That’s great.  A lot of kids never go out.  They’re just staring at screens, a bunch of electrodes popping all over the place.”  The man looked down at his notebook and then up at the hawk as it flew closer.  “Nah, that ain’t a broad-winged.  It’s just - “

“A red-tailed hawk, Tommy.  It’s a red-tailed.  It’s out of the sun, that tail’s red, no tail bands. How many’s that today?”

“Fourth one this morning, maybe our first juvenile, based on those belly bands. He’s a little small though.”

“That’s why I probably thought broad-winged at first I think.”

“No, Ben, it’s because you’re a novice.  You’re a bird watcher, buddy.  Not a real birder like the rest of us.  Well, I mean like us, not like those floppy hats oohing and ahhing over there.  You know what I mean.”  Some of the people with notepads chuckled.  One man erased the number 3 on the whiteboard and wrote “4” in its place.

“Easy, Tommy.  Ben, you’re a birder, don’t worry. Tommy’s just being Tommy.  But I’ll get you a floppy hat if you really want it.”  He smiled.  Ben laughed; he was no floppy hat. 

“Don’t worry, Ben,” Tom said, “You’re still learning, but you know how to really appreciate birds, not just wonder at them.  Birders observe and count.  They make accurate identifications.  To appreciate the beauty of a bird, you need an eye for detail and a keen knowledge of bird habits and movements through each season.  Those Floppy Hats, they just gasp like children at a circus.”

“So we got those four reds, seven kestrels, a peregrine, two sharp-shinned, a Cooper, the six broad-shouldered flock from earlier, and those two merlins on the tree there.  And, oh yeah, thirteen turkey vultures.”

Pakshi did not understand exactly what they said, but he saw the hawk they called red-tailed far away in the sky.  The tail seemed light brown to him, not red.  One of the men on the other side of the balcony was a tall man.   Pakshi thought he could probably see really far.  He had a floppy hat. The edges of his beard blew under his chin and the brim of his floppy hat rested on top of his binoculars. 

“Oooh!  What a wonderful little guy there!  He’s a runt alright - little engine that could.  He hasn’t had much air time based on those belly bands he’s got there.” 

“He is gorgeous, Merrill.  Just wonderful!  You know, I never get tired of seeing them. I watch them with joy each time.  Being mindful and in the moment.  It’s like that hawk and me are One, you know what I mean?  You can’t feel that if you just count like the Notebook Brigade over there.  You can’t reduce these beautiful creatures to numbers and statistics.”  Joan lifted up her camera.  She wanted to capture its flight as it came closer to them. 

Merrill said, “I hope you get some good shots of him.  I bet he has some vivid yellow eyes.  Penetrating to the soul.”

Pakshi could not see the hawk’s eyes.  He wondered where the red-faced vulture had gone.  His father kneeled down next to him with an open book.  “Those two, there,” he pointed to two birds with small, hooked beaks sitting on a leafless tree, “Those are merlins, Pakshi.  See, they look just like this picture here on page 241. That’s how you know.”

“Those sure are merlins,” said Merrill, as he pushed up his brim.  It flopped back down over his forehead. “Wait until you see them fly!  They’ll flap flap flap quite a bit, but they are so agile and make these hairpin turns. You’d think they were remote controlled, but they’re really little acrobats in the sky.  They scan the ground and then dive like lightning to catch their prey.  A really special bird.” 

Pakshi’s father said, “We’ve never seen merlins before.  I thought they were bigger, but they are quite beautiful and, I guess, ferocious, too.”

“They’re also little grumpy things!  They make these squeaky chattering calls, but I bet if they could talk, all they would say is “Hrmph’, like an old grouch or something.”

“Hmm, I guess they are grumpy, Nandy.  Their beaks do look like a frowny face, and there’s something to that.  It says something about the way they live, how they see the world. See, things like that you don’t really think about if you’re just counting and writing down numbers in a notebook, that’s -” 

“They’re about to go!”

The men with the notebooks turned their heads as the merlins pushed off the tree limb and flapped their wings.  “Quick wingbeats.  Glides fast.  They must be hungry.” 

Merrill raised the binoculars to her eyes, “They’re all the way over there already and, oh, look at that turn.  What a neat, tight turn, like ballerinas!  Astonishing each time I see it.”

“I wish I could capture that essence in my camera!”

Pakshi watched the merlins fly across the edge of the cliff, turn sharply and fly back towards him.  When they flew overhead, they made a noise that sounded like chip.  Pakshi thought it sounded like crying, but his father said that’s just how they talk.  The merlins landed back in the tree they had flown from.  A Floppy Hat said they were looking for a mouse.  A Notepad said they were looking for prey.

Pakshi heard a ferocious scream come from the red-tailed hawk.  It sounded like how a hawk on TV sounds.  He had thought the merlin would sound like that, but it chipped instead.

The Notepads looked up at the red-tailed. “Noisy, huh?  What do you think that means?  New to flying or asserting his dominance for the first time?” 

“He looks like he’s in his first year.”

“We know that, Ben.  But is he new and scared or new and ready? Know what I mean?  You have to think of things that way.”

The hawk circled above the tree with the merlins.  It screeched again and the merlins left their branch and flew up towards the hawk.  They chipped and chipped again and then continued to chip.  The hawk let out a raspy scream as the merlins circled it.

“Uh oh, looks like our young hawk wants a fight.” 

“How… awe-inspiring, just awesome!  Even when they’re so young.”

The hawk flew in a circle with one merlin above it and one below it, both of them chipping.  The merlins squeaked once and dashed at the hawk and turned right before they hit it.  The hawk wobbled in the air and almost flew upside down before it balanced itself in the sky.  The merlins chipped again and then flew directly behind the hawk’s red tail as if they intended to bite it off.  The hawk made a noise, almost like a crow, and flew away.

“That juvenile hawk learned its lesson there, don’t mess with merlins.  How should we report that?  Two merlins defended against a hawk, I think.”

“Told you they were grumpy little fellas.  They are not going to let up on that little guy just now.  They know he’s a scared baby.”

The hawk glided down so that it was level with the cliff and the merlins sped up and dove towards it from above.  The hawk lost its balance in the air, and its red tail fanned out and pointed to the ground, its beak jerked up towards the sky.  Its talons splayed out from its body, as the merlins drew closer to it.  It then righted itself to fly away and crashed into the side of the cliff. 

It hit the rock with a thump and then a shatter, then an electric fuzz and sparks that scalded the trees underneath.  The hawks' feathers disintegrated on the cliff face and left a chalky splatter from which metal and wire, some white with heat, exploded out and rolled down onto a ledge below.  A ring of triangular shards burst outwards from the center of the explosion as if a cheap plate had been thrown against the rock.  Two metal cylinders careened from each side of the hawk’s shattered torso, one with a bent lever stuck on its side so it spun like a dancer.  The other landed in the river and floated to the surface with a trail of black liquid behind it.  The parts of the hawk scattered on the ledge had burned black and cooled quickly, all of it tangled in wires that kept the mass together, though not in one piece.

The merlins chipped twice more and circled over the river and back onto their tree.

“What the hell,” Tommy said.  Ben and the other Notebooks stood next to him, staring at the debris on the ledge, their eyes, and their mouths, wide open.  “What’s going on? That can’t have happened.  What just happened?” Ben said.

The Floppy Hats were silent; they looked away from the ledge.

The merlins were scanning the ground beneath their branch.  A turkey vulture glided above the people and looked at them and then looked at the ledge.

“Ben, you may be a novice, but you just saw something even us real birders have never seen.  An exploder!  Can you believe it?”

“I never thought I’d see that!”

“Ceramic shingles, dual-action web.  I think I even saw a gyroscopic regulator!”

“You can’t even find this stuff on the video streams, I’ve looked for it.”

“Even if someone filmed it, they’d take it down right away.”

“The technology is incredible, autonomous flight mechanics, five-center sensors, layered quasi-feathered ceramic attachments,” Tommy said. 

“I don’t know what the real things were ever like, but could they have been any better than that?”

“Real things?” Pakshi asked his father.

Excited, Tommy answered the question; he thought Ben had asked it.  “Yeah, the organic ones, the ones that all died.  You know what I mean, real like the dinosaurs.”

“Hey, stop it, stop it!  There’s a kid here.”  Merril said and walked up to Tommy with Nandy, Joan and the other Floppies behind him.  “Stop looking at it.  Stop talking about it.  Just stop!”

“You don’t see this every day!” Tommy grinned.  “Add one exploder to the list!”

“You are shattering the illusion,” Merrill said, trying to keep his voice low enough that Pakshi couldn’t hear, but he could.

“We know they’re not real.  I don’t know if they’ve ever been real!  The boy can handle that.”

“They are real.  They are beautiful creatures and I would, and we all would, like to keep them and know them as beautiful creatures, not gadgets.”

“Then travel back in time, but it’s part of the fun!”  He tapped Merril on the shoulder, “Calm down. That’s why we’re here, right, to have fun?”

“I’m not, we’re not here for fun, you jerk.  You aren’t either; you just don’t know it.  This is the closest we get to real things, to what we all lost years ago.  Don’t ruin it for us.  Don’t ruin it for the kid.”

Pakshi did not understand what Tommy meant by time travel.  His father did say that the Hawk Watch would be fun.

“You’re a complete jerk, Tommy.  Not everyone has memories of organic birds like your old-ass.  These birds are the first real thing he thinks he’s seen and you’ve ruined it.”

“Daddy, are the hawks really real or like robots?”

“It looks real, doesn’t it, buddy? Just look around, look at all these birds.”  He pointed to the vulture circling the sky above them.

Ben said to Merrill, “Don’t worry, man.  I was his age when this happened to me.  My pops and I would go out and enjoy the woods.  I thought it was real and I loved it.  But when I found out it was all Social Community Applications, it didn’t bother me much.  It was still real to me!”

Nandy: “You can’t say that here!  SCA policy.  And in front of the child of all things.  You don’t know how he’s going to react. Oh my –”

“Do you have any other wafts of emotion to share?  Don’t worry, Ben, you didn’t say anything I wouldn’t’ve.”

One the Floppies took off his hat and threw it at Tommy.  Tommy pushed Merrill, “Control your people.”  Their chests were touching, their eyes locked onto each other. 

The Notepads yelled at the Floppy Hats and the Floppy Hats yelled back.  Pakshi could not understand what they said since everyone was yelling at the same time.  He was afraid they may start to hit each other.  He looked over at the ledge.  The hawk’s machine parts were gone and the white mark it had left on the cliff was gone. 

The vulture circled one more time and flew down the river.  The merlins chipped and flew into the trees below. The people shoved each other on the cliff’s edge. A flock of starlings flew above.

“Screw you!  You leave!”  “We assembled first, you get out.  Schedule another meet some other day.  Just not when we’re here.”  “You don’t deserve this place, don’t ever come back!”  “People like you ruin this for everyone.” 

They screamed and Pakshi could not hear anything else around him until a cry came from above, like the red-tailed but louder and deeper and scarier.  And the people stopped screaming and looked up at the blue-feathered contraption in the sky.  It had a curved yellow beak with a white tip, a white face with a blue cap and a black streak in front of its eyes.  Its wings were pressed to its side and it dove from straight downward into the flock of starlings.  It disappeared into the flock and emerged with three birds in its talons as the starlings scattered to escape.  It stretched its neck and snapped its beak onto two more starlings that vanished with a puff of disembodied feathers.

“A Giant-Breasted Peregrine!  Put that down, one Giant-Breasted Peregrine.”

“And what a show it put on!  What a hunter!  The epitome of animalistic aggression!”

“My heart is pounding; just beautiful.”

“Five birds in one shot, that’s a record sighting for us, guys!” 

“Wow, I haven’t seen one of these in years.  Ben, probably your first!”

All of the Floppy Hats had their binoculars to their eyes and looked up.  Standing next to them, all of the Notepads looked up.  They all followed the giant-breasted peregrine as it flew down the river to a distant tree to eat its catch.

Pakshi saw a man and woman walking towards the cliff.  They looked at the sky, there was nothing to look at any more.

“What a beautiful day.  See anything good yet?”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, “You missed a Giant-Breasted Peregrine.”

“It was beautiful, incredible,” said Merrill.  “It’s moments like that which keep us coming here.”

“Don’t worry, though, I’m sure you’ll see something good today.”

And the people made their eyes long and stared at a flapping thing in the distance.