For eco-philosopher David Abram, through such directly-experienced encounters with the “more-than-human world”, we recognize that we are a “human animal” : “Owning up to being an animal, a creature of earth. Tuning our animal sense to the sensible terrain…Becoming earth. Becoming animal. Becoming, in this manner, fully human.” (Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Pantheon Books: New York, 2010)). Using all our sensory faculties, we experience a kinship with other creatures. For example, a bridge between people and birds is felt through communing with the complex intonations of a bird’s song or the mechanisms of its flight. While speech, gesture, and silence are modes of communication beyond the domain of the human animal, reciprocally the quality of a bird’s flight also finds expression in our own muscular, emotional, or respiratory expansiveness.  Abram describes this perceptual blending with earthly presences as inhabiting an “awakened world”: “Every facet of the world is awake, and you within it.” (Becoming Animal) Where does sensorial awakeness to the hawk’s own aliveness and by extension to the teeming web of a living earth take our understanding of the relationship between ourselves and the planet? According to the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), founded by Abram, it takes us into a “relational ethics” based on a “new reciprocity with the rest of the biosphere.”

Certainly there is an intense presence required to deftly capture these instances in the lives of the hawks in a decidedly loud and distracted city environment. The fact of even noticing the birds demands a certain attentive appreciation for the everyday that is rare  in our usual rushed experience of our physical surroundings. A glimpse at awakeness—both human consciousness and a living earth—comes through in these photographs of the red-tailed  hawks.