We have a pair of hawks in the neighborhood

Buteo. They nest somewhere else but spend hours sitting in the dead tree across the street, waiting for lunch to come by I suppose. I can now see why sound editors always use a Red-Tail’s cry when showing a soaring bird. These guys’ voice is… less than majestic.

Are they Harris hawks?
We have a lot of those up here.

ETA: And, yes, they have a very unpleasing screetch.

The other thread here scrolled off, so just wanted to say that our female osprey (nest in the parking lot at work) laid her first egg today (seen deep in the middle of the nest for the first time).

But. I have seen zero matings this spring between the pair, and last year apparently nothing hatched. I hope this batch isn’t infertile either…

We have hawks in our neighborhood too, and one day I put a bunch of bird seed out for the local birds and while they were grazing a hawk swooped down and grabbed a little sparrow. The hawk struggled a little to take off while holding the sparrow in his talons & I could see that the sparrow was being squeezed to death as the hawk took flight. He flew into a nearby tree where I watched him devour the little bird :eek:

Many ages ago when this ancient planet was not quite so ancient, I was at my friend’s house out in the Ohio countryside. He had this cat that was pure white as snow, except for when bathed in the blood of its murder victims. This cat walked up to us with a fresh chipmunk kill in its maw and plopped it down in front of us. Possibly to display a trophy of accomplishment, or possibly as a warning to us to not get in its way. Anyway, my buddy went to grab the corpse to chuck in the trash when the damn thing sprang to life! The cat was able to toy with it a bit, but a passing car made a loud sound that distracted it long enough to lose grip on the chipmunk, which immediately scurried to the very top of a nearby tree where it could catch its breath and taunt the cat. Just as it started thumbing its cute lil nose at the disgraced cat, a hawk swooped in and carried it off to dinner. Yay nature!

Have you seen this video?

HA! yup, it was kinda like that, except at the top of a tree.

Come back when you’ve bred a vegetarian hawk. :slight_smile:

beowulff, you’re probably right. I didn’t think Harris’ Haaks got that big but after looking them up…

Some photos of our hawks:

Imgur
Imgur
Imgur
Imgur
Imgur
Imgur
Imgur
Imgur
Imgur
Imgur
Imgur
Imgur

While you ate a nice juicy burger? :stuck_out_tongue:

I live by a creek and my neighbors have seen hawks carry off ducklings and other small animals. More than once, I have tossed out birdseed for my ducks, and while they were feeding, their duckdar detected a hawk flying overhead and they made a beeline for the creek, which nearly creates its own weather system.

There is a nesting pair of Kestrels down the road that I see every time I drive/walk by. One is always sitting on the power line checking out the huge farmers field and looking for tasty mice.

Further away (I’ve not found the nest yet) is a Bald Eagle pair. Sometimes I see one fly by holding lunch in his feet.

There is some bird of prey that I just can’t quite identify hanging around too. It’s almost all white and sounds and looks like an Osprey but I’m about a 15 minute drive from the beach and I’m not sure if they nest that far away. I’ve only seen it twice, high in a tree above me and the trees here ( Vancouver Island) are so huge and full that I can’t get a good look.

I’m pretty sure there are Pileated Woodpeckers nesting in a tree in the forest where I walk by almost every day. They’re always right near the same huge, old tree.

We saw a pair of bald eagles last week when we were dropping off some lunches at the school. Eagles are pretty common around here because of the wetland nearby where they hunt.

A couple years ago, one of my Facebook friends posted that during the previous few days, she and the neighbors had noticed herons hanging around. They were puzzled as to what they were doing in her residential neighborhood on a hilltop…until she went out to her koi pond to feed the fish, and they weren’t there. In other words, the herons had located some nice tasty morsels in her yard, and indulged. :o

That same thing happened here in Kansas years ago, right here in Topeka. Two pairs of yellow crowned night herons set up in some trees. A neighbor ranted agains them because they ate her koi.

Several years ago, people woke up one morning and pointed their browsers to a local eagle cam, only to find that one of the eaglets was missing. :eek: Experts speculated that a hawk or owl took it, and some people were saying, “We need to find that bird, and kill it!” :rolleyes: Others said that whatever took that eaglet was only doing what came naturally, and how did we know that the squirrel or rabbit wasn’t pregnant or had a nest full of babies who would now starve to death? People care about things like that; animals don’t.

One of the cats that lives at an antique mall where I have a booth likes to go out and catch things, which he often brings back and eats in the parking lot. The owner once said, “He bats these things around, and then they disappear and I have no idea what he does with them.” (Really?) I replied, “You probably scooped what was left of those shrews, mice, etc. out of the litterbox the next day.” :smiley: