[Editor’s note: This essay first appeared in the “Chapters of Our Lives” issue of PREMIUM Magazine, which featured personal storytelling.]
Nestled on my porch, a cup of coffee in one hand and binoculars in the other, I spent the spring watching my neighbors. I’ve been watching them for almost 20 years, and I can’t get enough of the drama, but this season’s storyline was hitting me harder than in years past.
I bought my house in 2004, a 1925 Craftsman-style surrounded by century-old Aleppo pines and Italian cypress in Banning, California — a pass-through city between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. The house was a wreck. I was in my early 30s and almost as much of a wreck. I was going to go to grad school, fix myself, fix the house and pass through just like everyone else, only with a tidy profit and a bright future.
Then I spotted my neighbors, a pair of red-tailed hawks, nesting in the gentle slope of two sturdy pine boughs and, ultimately, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the view.
The female hawk, whom I long ago dubbed The Red Queen, has raised two decades of chicks, changed mates, weathered droughts, and navigated wild Santa Ana winds. There has been romance, nurturing, brawls with antagonists, and hostile takeovers of her territory. She hasn’t always won battles, but she always won the wars. She inspires me and I aspire to be her. I also want to win the wars.
In the view through my binoculars, I began to come to terms with the one war we couldn’t win. Where once she raised three and even four chicks, in the past few years she was only raising two and then only one. I watched her and her mate carrying food to a chick that was too small to see over the ridge of the nest but made demanding cries.
Until one day in May, there was nothing but silence.
I watched the parents peering into the nest. They met eyes for a moment and then, as if in agreement, the male leaned into the nest and gently lifted an unmoving chick with his beak. Launching gracefully from the pine, he flew toward Mt. San Gorgonio on steady wings until he was a dark and distant speck of sky.
Turning my attention back to The Red Queen, I saw a resolute sadness in her posture, or more likely, I saw through the lens of my own melancholy. Her eggs were no longer viable and her days of raising a family were ending.
I had wanted a family, but only if I could have the kind of relationship The Red Queen had with her consort. They doted on each other, preening each other’s feathers while surveying their territory. They fought bravely side-by-side in aerial battles against invaders. They split the duties of hunting and keeping their family warm. They weren’t just partners. They were a power couple. This was what I wanted and I had kept looking, but eventually I had to admit it was too late for a family. Now in my 50s, I thought, [BEGIN ITALICS] Me too, Sister. Me too. [END ITALICS] The one war we can’t win is the one against time.
There are only a few species in which menopause has been documented: four of the toothed whale species, including orcas, and humans. (And it was only in 2023 that scientists decided that chimpanzees experience menopause as well.) These species stop producing young but continue living for decades. The thought is that this adaptation is about social structure and grandparenting, but I’m not so sure. I suspect that biologists have not spent enough time researching menopause, or perhaps they just haven’t paid attention.
I suspected this primarily in my doctor’s office when I complained about my sudden need to sleep for 12 to 14 hours a day. No, I’m not depressed. My life is more fulfilling than it has ever been, and yet I sleep through my alarms when I desperately want to start my day. I’m fatigued. I’m hot when it’s freezing. I’m not myself. And the doctor pats my hand and tells me he wishes he could get that kind of sleep at night. I suppose he’s trying to bolster my spirits, but mostly he’s dismissing me. I’m female. I’m old. And despite his encouragement to take off some weight, I’m not a whale.
Science speculates that kin dynamics are why whales and humans thrive beyond their reproductive years. According to a 2019 article, “Evolution of Menopause,” in the journal Current Biology, “…selected costs seem to help account for early reproductive cessation. The efficacy of this strategy in minimizing reproductive competition between generations is highlighted by the strikingly low degree of reproductive overlap between generations in humans and killer whales compared to non-menopausal mammal species.”
This is the grandmother hypothesis. Honestly, though, it sounds like more dismissive nonsense to me. I refuse to believe that the only reason I might be graced to live long after my reproductive years is my continued usefulness in child rearing. Eons ago, when there was an old woman living alone in the woods, she did not harbor grandchildren. Instead, she tended to wisdom that was so foreign that she was terrifying. You had to be brave to request it, but her knowledge was her value.
I refuse to believe that The Red Queen is going to die soon simply because she has no more reproductive value in the ecosystem. And while some days I think it’s amazing that menopause isn’t the death of all women, I mostly think that we just aren’t paying attention to old and single females of any species, including birds.
I can’t attest to their knowledge but I can attest to their magic, because birds never seem to age in a traditional sense. They don’t get wrinkles and don’t turn gray. A healthy bird in adult plumage looks exactly the same from the year they are fully in adult coloration until the day they die.
I have changed, and The Red Queen has not.
Yet, there are birds that lay all the eggs they can until they run out, just like humans, and still live a fairly long life post-reproduction. Endoscopies in macaws in their mid-30s have revealed shrunken ovaries that no longer produce eggs, although the birds can live two additional decades. I can’t find any science that will tell me how long a red-tailed hawk will live past her reproductive years, let alone if she has hot flashes, mood swings, and loses bone density.
What I do know is that she is still here, and I am still here and there is more of our story to tell.
“The Red Queen,” illustration by Rebecca K. O’Connor (Credit Rebecca K. O’Connor)***
I had given up on The Red Queen’s continued motherhood, but she had not and her mate had certainly not given up on her either. They didn’t capitulate when the house beneath their longtime nest was torn down to the bones along with the hawk’s Aleppo pine that shaded it. Even as I wiped away tears and reckoned with eras ending, they were building a new nest in a tree two houses over.
Unfazed, they simply started over.
I watched them perfect their brand new home and then take turns incubating eggs and bringing each other food. I felt like I was watching a lot of heart being put into an effort I knew to be fruitless. I wondered if they would feel frustration or maybe even defeat as they realized they could no longer raise a family. I wondered if I should feel defeated for the same reasons.
Except that The Red Queen’s family has always been mine as well.
More than a decade ago one of The Red Queen’s chicks was deposited on my porch in a parakeet cage. There was no note, and I never found out who left him, but I knew what to do. I put him in an aviary where he could see the nest he had fallen from and fed him quail and mice until his flight feathers finished growing. When his sisters had started winging around the neighborhood, I released him, and The Red Queen took over mothering him and teaching him to hunt.
And isn’t this what women do? Even those of us who have no children of our own lend a hand when there is a need. We are all mothers in ways that are meaningful to us and we are rewarded for our efforts. I watched that chick become a fierce hawk worthy of The Red Queen lineage, knowing that I had been his mother too.
Neither The Red Queen nor I will ever be a grandmother, at least not in a way that lines up with the grandmother hypothesis. Surely though, we are both becoming that old woman harboring wild magic and knowledge worth seeking.
***
I may never have the opportunity to co-parent with The Red Queen again, but it isn’t an impossibility. She wasn’t frustrated and definitely not defeated because in the first week of June, I thought I heard a young red-tailed hawk begging for food.
I stepped outside to find the source, trying not to be too hopeful. I told myself I was imagining the plaintive call I had heard from inside the house. It was several minutes before I heard it again, but there he was, tucked against the trunk of a pine in my yard.
I was watching him when he spotted his mother and his occasional call became an insistent demand. Then he launched after her on wings he was only beginning to master and fumbled the landing next to her. I was both laughing and crying as The Red Queen slapped away Junior’s grabby talons and then offered him a freshly caught gopher snake.
I guess I really don’t know when The Red Queen will raise her last chick, but I think I’m starting to realize that life isn’t a fertility cycle and there’s no point in warring against time. I did go to grad school. I fixed the house and myself. I just didn’t pass through because it turned out this was home. My family is here, and I think perhaps the journey isn’t winding down so much as it is beginning. Perhaps one day she will stop laying eggs in the spring and instead invest her energy solely on herself. I wonder what I will learn from her then.
More ‘Chapters of our Lives’
This story is part of a collection of stories printed in November 2025. What the life, and death, of my 10-pound chihuahua taught me about living Researching family history unlocks keys to the past – and, possibly, your future How Melissa Etheridge hopes to change treatment options for addicts Was our house haunted? Memories of the unexplainable are as perplexing today as they were then Author W. Bruce Cameron remembers the lost art of boredom Read more ‘Chapters of our Lives’ More SCNG Premium content***
I watched The Red Queen this evening, arguing with the crows and holding a regal pose I learned by heart years ago. The lowering sun lit her feathers to a burnished red and the breeze ruffled her raised hackles as she let loose a territorial scream.
I stand up straighter when I watch her, the way I was taught to hold myself when I was young and told my posture mattered. I stand as if the world still watches me, as if there was a line drawn taut between my breastbone and the sky.
The Red Queen continues to inspire me. I continue to aspire to be her. Long may we reign.
Hence then, the article about what a red tailed hawk taught me about the power of aging was published today ( ) and is available on The Orange County Register ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( What a red-tailed hawk taught me about the power of aging )
Also on site :