Pickles by Brian Crane for August 07, 2021

Eagles, on the other hand, sometimes take little yappy dogs.

A gracious gift in exchange for being our National Bird.

well, Earl, imagine you’re a hawk circling around for McDonald’s or something else to eat instead

If I had the right kind of stomach for it, I’d be OK with that.

I depends on the species of hawk. The hawks around here have been know to take the occasional small dog or cat.

I’ve eaten squirrel. Didn’t taste very good though.

If you were a hawk, rodents would look pretty delicious.

A few of the smaller hawks, like the Coopers Hawk or Sharp Shinned Hawk or a Merlin are partial to small birds!

Nature can be ugly.

Shows things that look good in one view can be less attractive in another. Perspective is all.

This made me think of The Eagle and the Hawk by John Denver:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n4BPPaaoKc

“I am the eagle, I live in high country … In rocky cathedrals that reach to the sky. I am the hawk and there’s blood on my feathers … But time is still turning, they soon will be dry. And all of those who see me, all who believe in me … Share in the freedom I feel when I fly.

Come dance with the west wind and touch on the mountain tops … Sail over the canyons and up to the stars … And reach for the heavens and hope for the future … And all that we can be and not what we are."

There’s a pretty healthy population of hawks and other raptors around here. Peregrines are regularly breeding in the downtown area. There are quite a few bald eagles near here too. Owls, hawks, and the rest of their cousins are doing all right. Good to see.

I see Earl as more of an old buzzard than a hawk.

We have a lot of hawks here, when one dog I had was a puppy a hawk tried to take her but I happened to be there just in time to scare it away, the dog lived to 14 years old!

Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the turkey the national bird!

Earl time to get a drone with a camera . Now you have a bird’s eye view !

A couple of weeks ago we were sitting outside by a stream watching some ducks and woodchucks with their young just hanging out. In a flash, a red tailed hawk swooped down. There was a squeal, and one of the baby woodchucks was gone. Circle of life.

“…or a cat.”

(An eagle tried to eat my father back when he was a baby on a blanket in the yard in 1930. Good thing he failed or you wouldn’t be blessed by my presence. [collective cry of relief from millions…thousands?…several])

Nelson is so confused….

I remember a Boy Scout describing the majestic eagles soaring overhead to his boys. They were Turkey Vultures! What an idiot.

Let’s go have a hot dog.

like people eating squirrels here in Arkansas. I’d like to try it but where… there are no restaurants that serve squirrel!

We watched an osprey grab a steak off a grill in a marina and fly up to the spreaders of the same boat to eat it. (That sailor sure knew a lot words that we didn’t.)

We have some kind of small raptor nesting in the neighbourhood. Kestrel? Merlin?

Whatever it is, it flys around emitting what sounds like maniacal laughter all day long. I’m not sure how it expects to catch anything when it’s making so much noise. The voles must hear it coming from a block away.

…..or bald heads to poop on! ;o}

Nothing like a tasty rodent ! Yum !

If it weren’t for raptors and other decomposers, we would be up to our eyeballs in carcasses.

Visit Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania. https://www.hawkmountain.org/

Bear in mind, to a raptor, a mouse is a MRE.

Meal Ready to Eat

and its a good thing that Hawks exist along with other rodent predators, if they did not we would be overrun with mice-like in the Australian back country which is periodically overrun with mice

Yep, Earl is a thinker!

There’s always a down side

On the lake here, where I live, it is mostly fish that they crave; although my wife was nearly beaned by a rabbit carcass that was dropped by an eagle flying overhead

Well, we do have 75 million of them plus their certifiably crazy leader.

A lot of people think hawks only eat rodents, and some mostly do, but they also eat other birds, anything smaller than they are. There has to be survival of the fittest in the air as well as on the ground. Pigeons and doves lay eggs more or less constantly as long as the weather is good, mixing new eggs with babies about to fledge and are designed to be meat factories for them. A peregrine falcon will dive as as much as 240 mph to knock out a pigeon mid-air and grab it, and they and pigeons co-evolved: the pigeons fight back by having a flock go in a rising column so the falcon can’t get high enough above (they hope) to be able to dive like that and so there isn’t one alone for the falcon to go after.