The Hawk and the Mouse

After just a few tries, he would snatch the mouse off its perch, and with surgical precision, would thrust his beak through the skull, killing the mouse instantly.

A hiatus from IRRECONCILABLE: A NOVEL. I will be taking a break from posting installments of IRRECONCILABLE for a few weeks. In the meantime, I will be posting other content such as short stories on an approximately weekly schedule. IRRECONCILABLE WILL RETURN LATER IN THE SUMMER.

The Hawk and the Mouse

My graduate career at the University of North Carolina essentially began at a dinner at my first advisor’s home. Joanne was with me. We had been invited to dinner at the home of my advisor-to-be, Dr. Helmut Mueller, and his wife Nancy. We didn’t know them yet. Helmut was a grizzled-looking man, bearded and hunched over, and smoking a hand-carved curved pipe. Nancy was petite. We had a meatloaf dinner and planned to watch the moon walk scheduled for later that evening with them. I don’t remember much about the meatloaf. Helmut and Nancy specialized in ornithology, and as we settled into dessert, we were treated to dinner theater. Nancy left the table to fetch one of their owls, tethered to a stand, which she set up next to us. Great, nothing like having an owl to dinner! Next, Nancy, placed scissors and a mouse carcass in a tray on the table. She then proceeded to cut the carcass into pieces that she fed to the owl with forceps. Occasionally, the owl produced a crunching sound. Joanne and I acted nonchalant, as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. This all had a certain romantic appeal for me. I figured that I was living the way that animal behaviorists lived, joined at dinner by a mouse-crunching owl.

In Helmut’s lab, I began my project looking at the ethology of Siamese Fighting Fish, but also, as a research Assistant, I was committed to helping Helmut with his hawk studies. My first training session with him was pretty remarkable. The room was set up with a lectern on one side of the room, and an array of ten small pedestals arranged in a semi-circle on the other side. Helmut took me into a room lined with mouse cages and chose ten mice, which he placed into a shoe box and carried into the room containing the platforms. I dubbed this the ”killing room” for reasons that will become apparent. He placed a mouse on each platform. Nine of the mice were standard-issue white, but the tenth was black. Was this some sort of white supremacy thing? After all, this was North Carolina, and each evening, Jesse Helms, who ran the nearby Durham radio and TV station would announce the time and place of local Klan meetings. Helms would later become a stalwart of racism as a U.S. senator from North Carolina. Happily, it turned out not to be a racist scenario. Helmut was testing the hypothesis that hawks chose individual prey that differed from their peers. The differences that advocates of this hypothesis had in mind might be, for example, a physical disability that would give the animal a less agile gait than its fellows. This would, theoretically, serve evolution by culling the weak from the population. Helmut fetched the hawk that was to be our subject. It was a sparrow hawk, or kestrel, a bit smaller than the red-tailed hawks we also worked with. The hawk, named Bilbo, was perched on Helmut’s glove-covered hand. With his other hand, Helmut tossed me a thick glove like he was wearing. I slipped it on, and when he held Bilbo close to my outstretched hand, Bilbo jumped onto it. His claws tightly grasped my fingers. I felt like one of the falconers from an action movie. Helmut asked me to walk away from the platforms with Bilbo, and when he called for me to return, the mice were sitting primly, one on each platform. Nine whites, and one black. He took back Bilbo and faced the array of unsuspecting mice. He dipped his hand, and Bilbo took off, making a beeline for mouse number 3. Bilbo swooped and grabbed the poor victim off of its perch. What followed was a mid-air battle. Bilbo was pecking wildly at #3’s head, and the mouse was biting Bilbo’s foot that was holding it. They flew around together, sometimes tumbling toward the floor before gaining altitude again, until the mouse ceased struggling. Bilbo settled on the floor with his prize. There was blood. Helmut grasped Bilbo, the dead mouse in the bird’s gasp, and carried Bilbo to the other room, where Bilbo hopped onto his hawk perch, with one foot, and was left to finish his hard-earned meal.

Over the next few months, I handled the hawks, repeating this scenario. Two things became apparent. One is that the hawks became much more proficient at killing. Bilbo was lab-raised and had not had any experience with hunting before our first episode. After just a few tries, he would snatch the mouse off its perch, and with surgical precision, would thrust his beak through the skull, killing the mouse instantly. Clearly, the “kill script” was present in the naïve hawk but required a few practice sessions to be perfected. Second, there was no evidence that the “aberrant” color of the black mouse had any effect. Rather, each of the hawks developed a position preference, and would always choose a particular perch in the array. Since I knew the preference of each of the hawks, I felt like an executioner who should be wearing an executioner’s hood. It really wasn’t the best designed experiment. I don’t think that fur color was particularly salient for the hawks. But I became intrigued with why lab-raised white mice would politely wait on their perch to be picked off, even though they could see the hawk, and experience the consequences for their unfortunate perch-mate. I satisfied my curiosity by capturing a wild field mouse. It jumped off the platform and scurried away within a second of being placed on the platform. Clearly, inbred laboratory white mice aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, having lost some of their native smarts compared with their wild brethren. Another nail in the coffin of Helmut’s experimental paradigm. I decided to leave Helmut’s lab and continue my training in a lab I was more comfortable with. But I learned lots about doing science from the experience and am thankful to Helmut for providing the opportunity.