cover image A Wing in the Door: Life with a Red-Tailed Hawk

A Wing in the Door: Life with a Red-Tailed Hawk

Peri Phillips McQuay. Milkweed Editions, $15.95 (206pp) ISBN 978-1-57131-239-6

In 1998, a two-year-old red-tailed hawk, taken illegally as a nestling by a falconer, was released back into the wild on the 800-acre protected wildlife area in eastern Ontario where McQuay and her family lived. Because the hawk, whom they called Merak, was human-imprinted, it took the McQuays four years to shepherd her transition more or less successfully back into her natural environment. In this engrossing memoir, McQuay (The View from Foley Mountain, 1995) relates how Merak became a part of her family's daily life, and, despite the bird's hunting ability, depended on them for sustenance, particularly during the molting season. Her clean, careful prose sometimes yields lovely imagery, as in this description of Merak's acclimation: ""she practices teetering hops from branch to branch"" with ""a sober elation.... She seems to be holding up her feathers like a little girl hampered by long skirts."" McQuay unsentimentally evokes the bird's harsh beauty, and the frequent anguish inherent in harboring a wild creature; the hawk harassed the family's dogs and would have attacked their cats without human intervention. Meanwhile, McQuay constantly worried that Merak was undernourished, and supplemented her food with skinned muskrats from a neighboring trapper. Merak built nests and laid eggs every spring, but they were never fertilized. Although Merak eventually undertook an almost completely independent existence, she still visits the McQuays when she is in need. B&w photos not seen by PW. (Mar. 20)