The Windhover: The Kestrel is Back

This morning after I had watered my gallardia flowers out in the golden greenbelt and was climbing up the little hill just south of the now dry headwaters of Calaboose Creek, I saw a bird on top of the power pole on the brow of the hill. I thought it might be a red-shouldered hawk so I watched it closely as I climbed and then stopped to observe it. Finally, the bird dove from the top of the pole and showed his blue-gray bow of wings--not the red-shouldered buteo hawk but the kestrel, the smallest of falcons.

Gerard Manley Hopkins saw in this bird a sacramental representation of Christ as it appears in his poem, "The Windhover," which begins:

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing,
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, --the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act. . . .