Hawked

If you’ve followed Senior Women Web for awhile, you may have come across a column a few years back in which I admitted to being in love with the many birds outside my kitchen window. It’s definitely a one-sided love affair, inasmuch as I doubt they are aware that I exist on the other side of the glass. Even if they did, it would be silly to interpret the birds’ enthusiasm for filling their bellies as something which indicates affection for the providers of the feast (unlike my voracious offspring, who probably love me best when I am in the kitchen).

When I open the back door to step out onto the deck, the birds flee. No doubt they perceive my gigantic self as alarming and dangerous. Finches of all kinds, chickadees, titmice, Carolina wrens, towhees, cardinals, all scatter pronto. There are even a couple of nuthatches and woodpeckers in the mix, seeking a bit of vegetable matter to supplement their usual diet of the grubs and insects that live in tree bark. Only the tiny hummingbird stays at his feeder when I emerge, correctly assuming that anything as ponderous as a human poses no threat to him. The rest return swiftly when I go back into the kitchen, their love of black oil sunflower seeds and Niger thistle overpowering their fear of my return.

The only real problem in this pretty picture is a bunch of predatory squirrels and raccoons, who feel free to interfere at will. We seem to have squirrels of unusual persistence and intelligence, because we’ve never yet found a squirrel-busting feeder that can foil them. And raccoons, of course, are just plain geniuses, which, added to their opposable thumbs, enables them to unscrew, outfox, and destroy any and all measures taken to stop them. We live in an uneasy state of truce with them, because after all, they too have to eat.

Last year, our neighbor, a bona fide ornithologist, pointed out to me a pair of red-shouldered hawks that had built a nest in the enormous trees in the gully between our houses. Using a scope that he had set up in the woods, he could keep watch on their chick, and even take a photo of it. It was, like all babies, adorable: snow white and round-headed, peering up over the edge of the huge nest.

Before a red-shouldered hawk chick fledges, the parents stay close by, so we had plenty of time to observe the whole family. Often the parents stopped to rest on the railing of our deck, or perched in a nearby tree. My ornithological guru tells me that they are believed to mate for life, and usually return to the same area to make a springtime nest. This year, sure enough, they came back. They moved the location of the nest, making it harder for us to see it once the trees leafed out, but it’s still in the same area, and they still visit us regularly.

Oddly enough, the smaller birds don’t seem to be particularly afraid of the hawks, although they do fly into the branches of the trees nearby while the hawks are on the deck. The squirrels are smart enough not to show up. The chipmunk population, however, has simply disappeared, which means that my pots of herbs have a chance of making it through the summer. Thank you, hawks.

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Hawked

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