I'm notoriously bad at identifying raptors. Caracaras and the common vultures I get every time. Ospreys, too. Bald eagles -- the adults, at least -- are hard to miss. I can reliably make a kestrel, and I once saw a wild Aplomado falcon.Many of the others, though, are just a jumble of talons and hooked beaks and barred-striped-spotted underparts. I'm pretty sure I've assigned many birds that didn't belong to the Red-tailed hawk clan, though I've likely misidentified far fewer Red-tailed hawks as something else.
Today at lunch I was sitting quietly at the table on our back porch, reading, when I heard a commotion at the bird feeder. I looked up to see a very noisy male cardinal. Nice. Then, I saw a grayish blur flutter across the back of the yard -- heard it too; White-winged dove, I assumed.
A minute or so later, a chunky bird landed on the fence just a dozen feet away. I glanced up, thought "dove," and went back to my book. Then it dawned on me: that was no dove. I look again, to find a smallish hawk peering back at me. The hawk sat on the fence for more than a minute, then hopped into the neighbor's photina bush, fluttered back to the top, peeked at me again, and then flew off.
The whole while I was intensely cataloguing: dark gray/black head and back, rusty barred chest, wide stripes on tail, dark beak, faint eyebrow stripe ....
As soon as the bird flew off, I dashed inside for the books. I turned first to the falcons, because of it's small size and longish tail -- and also the fact that it was hanging around my backyard. Nothing there fit the bill, so I started flipping through the pages.
As best I can tell, our visitor was a Sharp-shinned hawk, which looks much like a Cooper's hawk, only smaller. It's no surprise, then, that Sharp-shinned hawks -- winter visitors in this part of Texas -- primarily eat songbirds. I hope it doesn't too terribly often, but I'd be glad to see it again that close when I have a camera at hand.Today's hawk was the second bird-eater to visit the neighborhood in recent weeks. Several weeks ago, on several different nights, a pair of Great horned owls held a hoot-off all across the back of the yard and into the greenbelt. It's mating season for Great-horned owls, and mating season is when they are the most vocal.
Great horned owls dine on their little cousins, Eastern screech owls, among other critters.
[Red-tailed hawk in flight, photo ©2006 Walter Siegmund, used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. Illustration of Sharp-shinned hawks in the public domain.]
