This one had been in the lineup for this week’s Estate Find until the beaver bumped it, but I still have the pics sitting here, so…
Looked out the back window the other day, around mid-afternoon, and noticed that we had a lurker out there.
This is a red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus,) almost certainly one of the ones that had been regularly hunting in the front yard much earlier this year – for convenience’s sake, I’m going to consider this one the female based on previous observations. She was sitting in roughly the middle of the yard, which gave here a good line of sight (and flight) down to the pond edge where the wood ducks congregate at feeding times. This was not either feeding time, sitting well between, and the wood ducks were nowhere to be seen, but it was still a suspicious perch.
I crept out carefully so as not to spook her before I got a few frames, but it was wasted effort, since she didn’t appear to have the faintest concern over my presence. It was bit of a chilly day, not really that bad, but she appears to be coping with the cold, which is interesting because I’ve seen the pair perched in the same general locale when the temperatures were well below freezing.
Perhaps a week earlier, I’d gone out through the garage and spooked her from the front lawn, where she flew to her typical perch on the streetlight at the end of the driveway, but that was how we knew the pair seemed to be returning to their old habits. Now we’re keeping an eye out, because while we fully understand the balance of nature thing and it’s not like there’s a scarcity of wood ducks, we’re still not keen on losing them to the hawks, especially not when we’re the ones coaxing them up onto the pond edge with corn.
By the way, this is a typical habit of red-shouldered hawks: they tend to find perches well within the canopy of the trees and on a branch close to the main trunk, limiting their visibility and profile against the sky or background. Red-tailed hawks, on the other hand, usually perch out in the open, highly visible, but over areas where rodents are more likely to appear, which is why you see them along the mowed verges of highways.
After several frames, I sent this one on her way with a few sharp clacks of two wood blocks together – there’s plenty of other food sources in the area, and she’ll probably be hunting the anoles in the front yard in the mornings anyway.