How could we describe hawk after the grouse eggs hatch?

When the chicks were born, Hawk continued to carefully guard them. When they would run off, she would quickly find them and return them home. And again, when animals tried to take them, she would attack them. She was not even friendly to Paulsen about them. She remained this irate and difficult until after most of the chicks had grown up. Most of them went back into the wild.

However, when the chicks were gone, Hawk decided to quiet down. She was no longer as irate or difficult. Paulsen emphasizes that her personality nonetheless retained important common elements with her traits displayed most clearly when protecting chicks not her own.

Paulsen draws from this experience the lesson that animals are capable of surprising acts of altruism that do not seem to make sense in any other context than that they have the ability to simply care for other living things. In one way, Paulsen intends this amusing story to illustrate the emotional complexity of animals.