I witnessed a murder once. I was on an Antarctic cruise for my big book on penguins, and while we were walking with a naturalist through a penguin colony, we saw a bunch of baby skuas ruthlessly, really ruthlessly, attacking a smaller baby bird. The parents just looked the other way. They probably thought, “Birds being birds, now is the time to kill and eat a baby penguin.”
I once had a staring contest with a raven in Yellowstone Park. As I approached, the raven, about the size of a Velociraptor, I recall, was pecking at a carcass. I was writing a book on dinosaurs at the time and was fascinated by the fact that birds are descended from dinosaurs. I stared at the raven. It stared back. I approached. The raven didn't budge. I backed away humming the Kenny Rogers song about gamblers, “You've got to know when to hold 'em.” I told myself I was backing away because it was ethically wrong and illegal to disturb wildlife in the park.
I once again had the privilege of staring down a bald eagle, this time in the marshes of Delaware Bay in southern New Jersey. I was writing a profile of Pete Dunn, founder of the World Series of Birding and author of numerous books on birds. Dunn spotted the eagle about a football field away. I peered at it through my spotting scope and binoculars. The eagle stared back, and given its eyesight, it must have noticed me. Its gaze was unwavering. I think it was sizing me up, realizing I was too big to be eaten, and wondering what a newbie like me was doing with Pete Dunn.
There is a gaze that refuses to yield: Kaa in The Jungle Book, the ravens, the birds of prey. And the mind behind that gaze is very different from ours. Don't take my word for it. Read Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk, especially the part where the goshawk she is trying to tame clenches his talons. Hungry and expectant, she heard the sound of a human baby crying just outside her window.
Beneath those beautiful feathers there really are dinosaurs. And the bird that to me most resembles a dinosaur, transporting me in my mind back to the Cretaceous period, is the great blue heron. I have long watched herons hunt for fish along ponds and riverbanks, their slow, shambling movements on impossibly stick-like legs. It looks like an animatronic structure made with old technology, with a snake-like neck and a pickaxe-like beak that attacks with quick, blurry stabs and then swallows you, a small fish, whole.