A few years ago, news items of interest to those in Connecticut listed reports of assaults by hawks on people. Almost all of the attacks on people were in Fairfield, and a few occurred in Avon. I puzzled over the location of the assaults for a while. After all, we in northeast Connecticut have lots of hawks, but no attacks by hawks on humans. Then I figured it out. The people in Fairfield are rich. They eat filet mignon, so they probably taste better than people in Windham County, who eat hamburger. The reason Avon has had only a few attacks is that Avon is only upper-upper middle class, so less filet mignon, and we in Windham County are working class and hardly ever eat filet mignon.

In addition, people in northeast Connecticut are feistier than those in Fairfield.  After all, when Israel Putnam was plowing his field along with his son and got word of the battle in Lexington and Concord, he just left his plow in the field and rode 100 miles (on his horse, not in his Lexus like an Avon person might do) to Cambridge to aid the Americans. He fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill. Windham County was filled with brave patriots. In Fairfield there were a lot of Tories, who checked the reports from the New York Stock Exchange every day, rather than risk safety of wealth or health by fighting. The same types of people live in those two counties now. Why do I say that?  Well, the bird experts advise looking up at the hawk while it hovers and soars in the air, not ignoring it, because the bird likes to attack from the back. People in northeast Connecticut automatically look up at the bird, because they are the ones who raise chickens, minks, or rabbits, all of which are eaten by hawks. The only minks in Fairfield are already on the backs of the humans, and people don’t even eat chicken in Fairfield.

The hawk called Cooper’s Hawk eats only birds. It is also called a chicken hawk. I have had neighbors both in Scotland, where I lived for years, and here in Hampton where I now live, who lost chickens to chicken hawks. To save the rest of their flocks, they had to protect the chickens when they were outside by a cage-like apparatus with chicken wire roofs and sides on their outdoor coops. Chicken hawk has come to mean, in popular terms, a person who is militaristic, but avoids any service of his own. Eisenhower is one president who fought in World War II, and then in his farewell address as president, warned the nation about letting a military/industrial complex run the nation. The last president to serve in combat in a military conflict was George H. W. Bush. Since then we have had presidents willing to engage in new military conflicts. If presidents grew up in rural areas, would they be inclined not to wage war, but rather to use tactics and diplomacy?

Angela Hawkins Fichter