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106 june/july 2026 through being attacked by a hawk,” he says. “It falls on her arm and wraps itself around, just trying to hang on to what it fell onto. And then it sees this woman’s face 2 feet from it. The snake sees this as another predator. That’s why the snake is striking at her face. It wasn’t attacking her; it was defending itself.” With the tractor still rolling, the mower still cutting, Peggy still scream- ing and flinging, andWendell still bliss- fully weed-eating out front, Peggy’s consciousness was abruptly invaded by yet another burst of sensory input too bizarre to register: Now a hawk was there on her arm, clutching at the snake with its razored talons, furiously beating its wings around and above her head in a thunderous flapping thrum. Her heart nearly beat through her sternum. Tomake sense of this startling develop- ment, let’s now learn a little about hawks. Why would one drop a snake from the sky? And would a hawk really brave a noisy tractor and shrieking human to go back for its lost prey? Kevin McGowan, a biologist at the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell Univer- sity, says it’s not that uncommon for a hawk to drop a snake. “It’s hard to be a hawk,” he explains. “They have to learn how to catch stuff and kill it without getting hurt and letting it get away. And that’s not easy to do.” Rural folklore holds that hawks kill snakes by deliberately dropping them from on high, sometimes aiming spe- cifically for barbed wire fences. Not likely, says McGowan. When snatched up by a hawk, unless they’ve been instantly dispatched, snakes might readersdigest.co.nz 107 wrap around the bird’s feet, a wing, its body. “If the snake is wriggling and trying to fight back,” he says, “the hawk could lose its grip while it’s flying along.” Cobb concurs: “The hawk has to drop it or maybe go down with the snake.” Indeed, both experts are aware of cases in which hawks have been done in by their serpentine prey. So OK, the hawk drops the snake accidentally, or perhaps out of sheer self-preservation. But would a hawk really plunge down to retrieve its prey from a human astride a chugging tractor with a clat- tering mower behind? “It strikes me as pretty weird,” McGowan says. “This is an extraordi- narily unusual occurrence. Most hawks are scared of people. This one should have been but apparently wasn’t.” But he has a theory that might explain this unusually bold behavior. “It’s conceivable this is a young bird, hatched this year and still trying to fig- ure out how to do things,” he says. This hawk hadn’t learned the classic life les- son about just letting some things go. “I mean, if it’s a big snake, it’s a big hunk of meat and you hate to lose it,” McGowan says. “So the hawk certainly would have the urge to retrieve it.” Quick tally of Peggy Jones’s abysmally bad luck thus far in the story: Hawks don’t usually drop their prey, but this one did, managing to hit her with it. Snakes don’t always catch themselves and wrap around the thing they landed on, but this one did. And to cap it off, not all hawks are feckless juveniles just learning their trade and thus foolish enough to come back for their fumbled prey … but this one seems to have been. We continue. The hawk seized the snake and pulled with such power that Peggy could feel it lift her arm forcefully skyward. “I felt a good tug,” she says. “But that’s when you could feel that that snake was holding on tight.” Before Peggy could react, the hawk flew off empty-handed (as it were). Not surprising, says Cobb. “Snakes are quite muscular, and those coils are hard to break.” For the briefest moment, Peggy was left alone again with an even more beleaguered snake as the tractor zig- zagged crazily up toward the mobile homes the couple rent out. But as quickly as the hawk had disappeared, it reappeared, again beating the air about Peggy’s head, again clutching and slashing at her armwith its talons. Again the hawk failed and departed. A moment later, another pass, another vicious grabbing, another failure. Oh, my Lord. Please help me. Some- thing’s got to give here , Peggy thought. And something did give—the snake, weakened from constant attacks by the hawk’s talons. On its fourth sortie, the bird of prey managed to yank the snake off Peggy’s arm and abscond with its meal.