Like a Hawk!

A couple of weeks ago, Butch told me he’d seen a hawk outside. But it was small and definitely not a red tail. I hadn’t seen anything like that here. They usually sit in the trees that line the fields. So I was backing in the garage one night and saw that hawk buzz across the dirt piles across the road. It flew over in our neighbor’s tree and since there are no leaves anywhere-I got a good look at him. Out comes the trusty bird id field guide, and it was a Coopers Hawk. Okay, maybe anyone else could id him without help, but I’d not seen one that size before. We’ve seen him from time to time.

Last weekend we were eating lunch, watching the goldfinches and doves on the feeders I have (got some cardinals at the new feeder) and all of a sudden everyone just went nuts and disappeared. Like made themselves scarce-quick. Then we noticed why. A red tail had buzzed into the yard behind us and into the evergreens there.

RUN-RUN little birdies and hide! I guess that should be fly-fly little birdies.

Someone definitely put out the alarm on that one. Made sense why everyone just scatterered the way they did. I thought it looked like he had flown from the evergreens down onto Jeff’s back deck, but there was no way he’d get up that close to a house. Au-contraire. Tonight, we’re eating dinner, and Butch says-look, look on Jeff’s deck! And sure enough there was Mr. Red-tail just sitting there as nice as you pleased. He wasn’t really sitting still like he was trying to make himself “invisible” or anything, but just hanging out. He sat there for a while and flew off a couple of houses down, and sat on their deck rail.

That’s just fine and dandy, but as Pap once said, he wasn’t filling the bird feeders so the hawks could have plumped up grain fed dinners!

Because of the distance and through the windows, the pics didn’t turn out so good. Trust me, even though it might look like a penguin, it really is a red tail!

And yes, believe it or not, I KNOW we're goofy!