Night hawk

The night hawk is a minor but precisely placed creature in the Oklahoma landscape of The Grapes of Wrath, appearing at two structurally significant moments. Its first occurrence is in the novel's opening chapter, where it is named among the birds that appear in the drought-stricken fields. The text describes how, as the sun flared down day after day and the corn weakened, the birds of the sky—including the night hawk—were part of the failing natural order. The night hawk is not singled out for individual description there; it is one element in a catalogue of creatures that share the land's distress. Its second and more developed appearance comes at the end of chapter 6, after the long scene at the ruined Joad farmhouse. Tom Joad, Jim Casy, and Muley Graves have built a fire, cooked rabbits, and talked through the evening. Casy has just risen to his feet, paced back and forth, and declared his new understanding—that there may be a place for a preacher among the people on the road. The text then notes: "The bats flittered in and out of the dull firelight, and the soft watery burble of a night hawk came from across the fields." This is the only time the night hawk's call is described in the novel, and it is given a distinctive, onomatopoeic quality: a "soft watery burble." The sound comes from across the fields, not from the immediate vicinity of the fire, placing the bird at a distance, a voice from the dark beyond the circle of human activity. The call follows immediately after Casy's speech, serving as a natural punctuation to his declaration. The night hawk's "watery burble" is a sound of the night, of the open country, and of the ongoing life of the land that continues regardless of human drama. It is a creature of the dusk and the dark, active when the day's heat and the day's visible suffering have passed. Its call is the last sound heard before the scene shifts to Tom's private thoughts about his homecoming, and then to the arrival of the car with the deputy sheriff. The night hawk thus marks the brief interval of stillness and reflection between Casy's spiritual breakthrough and the intrusion of the law. In the novel's broader ecological scheme, the night hawk is one of the many wild creatures—the land turtle, the gopher snake, the jackrabbit, the coyote—that populate the intercalary chapters and the narrative scenes alike. These animals are not merely decorative; they are part of the living fabric of the land that the tractors and the dust are destroying. The night hawk's call, heard across the fields at night, is a reminder of a natural order that persists, fragile and threatened, alongside the human catastrophe.