No one will ever know for sure. Was he content to rely on humans for food, water,
companionship — everything? Or did he ever look beyond the wire mesh
and wonder: What if? He was nearing a record. No red-tailed hawk had ever
lived to 30 years. Confiscated by the state Department of Natural Resources
from someone who’d snatched him soon after he hatched — keeping
a raptor without permits is illegal — Mani was at least 27.
He’d arrived at the Henson Robinson Zoo in 1979, when he was less
than a year old. By all rights, he should’ve died of natural causes a
decade ago. Instead, he’d lived all these years, never once
stretching his wings to catch a thermal. Maybe it was good genes. Or maybe it was destiny. Mani, like many folks past their prime, was overweight.
Full-grown red-tailed hawks should weigh between 2 and 4 pounds, and males
are supposed to be smaller than females. Mani weighed in at a hefty 5 1/2
pounds — not surprising, considering the lack of exercise and the
fact that he didn’t have to work for his food. He killed the odd
chipmunk that strayed into his cage but subsisted day to day on mice and
quail that were already dead when his keepers handed them over. After a
lifetime of this, experts say, hawks can’t fend for themselves. By any measure, red-tailed hawks are marvelous
creatures. They mate for life and use the same nests year after year, males
and females working together to build shelter for their young. Their
eyesight is eight times more powerful than a human being’s. With
wingspans of 4 feet or more, they soar in search of food, barely twitching
their feathers, until they spot a mouse or snake from 100 feet or higher.
They are sufficiently swift and powerful to overtake and kill a starling in
midair. Although he’d never mated or stalked prey in the
wild, Mani had accomplished much in his life, traveling throughout Illinois
to appear in classrooms, fairs, and television shows aimed at teaching the
public about hawks. He’d had his share of adventure. In 1998, someone
stole him and tried to sell him. Hours after snatching him, the thief put
Mani on the roof of his car and was promptly busted by a passing police
officer who knew something wasn’t right, zoo officials say. The thief
did prison time, which is preferable to the punishment levied on hawk
thieves in medieval England, where falconry was the province of nobles.
Anyone who dared steal a bird in those days could have their eyes plucked
out. Red-tailed hawks are widespread and common.
They’re usually the ones motorists see circling when traveling the
nation’s highways (they are not proud — roadkill is a perfectly
acceptable, and easy, meal). But birds with Mani’s attributes are
rare. Completely at ease around people, Mani didn’t complain when
picked up or taken for a ride in a car. Indeed, he thought himself more a
person than a bird, a phenomenon known as imprinting. That happens when
hawks are taken from nests at such a young age that they bond with human
beings, thinking that they are the same species as the person who provides
their food. This can pose a problem come springtime, when hawks mate. Mani
never got too aggressive, but he was known to hop around his cage
collecting sticks, as if trying to impress his keepers with his
nest-building skills. A hawk that likes people. People who feel sorry
for a hawk that’s never soared. It added up to an incredible
adventure for Mani. Where he went and what he did, no one will ever know.
Six weeks into an Indian summer that just
wouldn’t quit, someone was thinking about Mani. Sometime during the
night of Oct. 6, the bird came face to face with his would-be saviors. Police say that it was Sean Coleman, who broke into the
zoo that night with his friend Adam Loper. Mani might be worth thousands of
dollars to someone who wanted an easy-to-handle raptor, but neither Coleman
nor Loper, both 20, was interested in money, police say. They wanted to set Mani free. It would have been easy
to walk right up to him. “Initially he would probably have been very
scared, being taken out of his normal surroundings where he lived —
he would have had to have been thrown in some kind of a sack or box to get
him over the fence here at the zoo,” says Talon Thornton, director of
the Henson Robinson Zoo. Authorities say that Coleman and Loper, who were
with at least one witness that night, drove to a treed area on West
Washington and took Mani out of the car. If they were expecting to watch
him spread his wings and soar magnificently into the moonlight, they were
disappointed. “One of the girls who was with them said that
when they let him go, he just sat there,” Thornton says. “They
tried to get him to take off, but he just sat on the ground.”
The girl, Thornton says, was worried enough that she
returned in daylight to make sure that Mani hadn’t been eaten by a
coyote or a fox. He was gone. Although Thornton stresses that animals are
at zoos for good reasons, that freeing a hawk like Mani could easily doom
the bird, he doesn’t hesitate when asked whether he thinks Mani liked
being free. “Sure,” he answers. “I imagine after that
initial shock and stress that he went through, he probably enjoyed flying
around — until the point that hunger set in and he wasn’t able
to find food. What they thought they were doing was setting the bird free
— but they just didn’t have enough information.”
Besides food, Mani needed space. Red-tailed hawks are
territorial and will attack intruders — their range varies from a
half-square mile to two square miles. Mani was released in a wooded area
with a stream and fields nearby, ideal hawk habitat, so he may well have
been driven elsewhere soon after his release. Thornton knew Mani as well as anyone did. The zoo
director had taken him to dozens of educational shows through the years.
His deep feelings for a bird that his staff spent hundreds of hours
training and nurturing are obvious. “I was very angry, very
upset,” he says — and very, very worried. Acting on a tip, police arrested Loper and Coleman less
than a week after Mani disappeared. Until then, no one knew whether Mani
was on the wing or the black market. In the first two days after his
disappearance, searchers put 300 miles on the zoo’s van, chasing hawk
sightings. Now that they knew where he’d been freed, they had a
starting point, but it was little help. They saw three different red-tails
in the area in the next few weeks, fueling speculation that Mani had been
chased off. Because he was taken at night and spirited away in a car, he
would have had no landmarks to guide him back to the zoo. During those
first few days, searchers combed the area from first light until well after
sundown, using flashlights. Time and again, zoo officials rushed to a
sighting, only to find the bird, Mani or not, had flown by the time they
arrived. “We knew he had the instincts to hunt, but
there’s a huge difference between a chipmunk getting into his
enclosure and seriously going after and catching food on his own without
any barriers,” Thornton says. The weather, at least, was on Mani’s side.
Temperatures remained in the fifties and sixties as October turned into
November, so he wasn’t likely to freeze. Eventually Thornton and his
staff gave up hope of ever seeing Mani again. “After seven weeks, we
said to each other that if he was still alive and doing well, hey,
that’s great for him,” Thornton recalls. “On the other
hand, we didn’t think that was too likely.”
Bob Cain was getting ready to celebrate his
wife’s birthday on the afternoon of Nov. 23 when he noticed a hawk
perched on an old clothesline pole in the couple’s backyard. The couple often spotted hawks soaring above their home
on Palomino Road, but this one was different. “He was observing us — he wasn’t
flying away,” recalls Michelle Cain, Bob’s wife. “I
thought it might be Mani from the zoo.” More as a joke than anything else, the couple called
out “Mani!,” but the hawk didn’t react. Never getting
closer than 25 feet or so, the couple took pictures of the bird, which
eventually hopped down to the ground. A black cat approached. Bob figured
that the hawk would attack, but the bird wasn’t interested.
“The cat seemed to be the aggressor, really,” he recalls.
“We ended up chasing the cat away.” The bird hopped up to a
head-high branch. As darkness fell, the Cains called the zoo. At first they had trouble getting anyone interested.
“The gal said, ‘I’ll add it to our list of
sightings,’ ” Michelle recalls. “She said, ‘If we
went out on every call we got, we’d be going out
constantly.’” Springfield being a tight-knit community, they
looked in the phone book. Sure enough, Thornton was listed. He wasn’t
home, but his wife suggested that they call city police, who put them in
touch with a zoo employee. “I told her it looked in pretty good
shape,” Bob says. About two hours after it arrived, a zoo employee came
to the Cains’ home. Sure enough, the hawk had a white spot on the
back of its head, just like Mani. When the employee approached, he
squawked. The employee borrowed a pair of gloves and a plastic tub from the
Cains, retrieved the bird and drove him back to the zoo. Mani, at last, was
home on Thanksgiving eve. Bob, who plays guitar in a band called Jack
Flash, announced the good news at a show a few hours later at Spillway
Lanes, prompting loud applause. “I think they were clapping more for
Mani than for me,” he says. Mani had obviously found something to eat during the
nearly two months he was away. Still, he’d lost more than half his
weight. He ate four or five mice and a day-old chick that night. “He
was absolutely famished,” Thornton says. Mani was saved in the nick of time. The day after the
bird returned to the zoo, the temperature plummeted to 16 degrees.
“There was no way he would have survived that night, being as thin as
he was,” Thornton says. “He didn’t have the fat reserves
to help insulate his body.” The Cains live less than three miles from where Mani
was let go. “He was probably just flying around,” Thornton
says. “He ended up in a residential area. He had no reason to leave
the area where he was released unless he was forced out by other hawks or
he was looking for food — looking for people. I don’t have a
definite answer as to how I know this, but I know he looked at us, our
zookeepers, as providers of food. I imagine he was looking at these people
[the Cains]: ‘When are you going to bring me my food?’
”
By early January, Mani had recovered sufficiently to
resume television appearances, although the cameras came to him. On March
15, four months after his release from the zoo, Mani was found dead in his
cage. “Basically he had a heart attack,” Thornton says. The zoo
director doesn’t believe that Mani’s time outside a cage
contributed to his death, although final necropsy results that came in last
week showed abnormalities in his liver, suggesting that he’d started
burning fat to stay alive. Neither Loper nor Coleman responded to interview
requests. Each has been charged with felony burglary and theft. Their
trials are scheduled for April 17. Thornton says he’s not sure what
he would do if he were the judge or prosecutor. “They should be punished, but what that
punishment is, I don’t know,” Thornton says. “Thankfully,
that’s not something I have to decide.” He says he hasn’t
spoken with the alleged thieves but would welcome the chance so he could
explain why the zoo’s animals can never be free. There has been talk
of having the them perform community service at the zoo. “I
don’t know if that would be best,” Thornton says.
“We’ve got seven full-time zookeepers who work here.
They’re still very angry — and they are the ones who had the
responsiblity of caring for Mani seven days a week. They have different
philosophies than I do.” Mani is at a taxidermist and will eventually be put on
permanent display at the zoo. Whether he’ll spend eternity with
spread wings or on a perch will be left for the taxidermist to decide. “We haven’t figured out a pose,”
Thornton says.
This article appears in Mar 30 – Apr 5, 2006.
