Author Archives: momdude

The raucous calls from above were LOUD, so I knew that the red-shouldered hawks were close.

There was one circling straight up over the neighbor’s yard, another calling from the trees about three houses down. It soon came up to joing this one.

The call is very distinct, as is the black & white pattern on top of the wings. Another thing that’s very noticable is how this hawk will be flapping its wings almost constantly, coasting and gliding on the thermals only a quarter to third of the time.

With these two about, it wasn’t more than a couple minutes before the red-tailed hawk pair showed up to reassert their domination and drive the red-shouldered hawk pair out of their territory.

Note the namesake red tail. This particular bird is also recognizeable as one of the locals due to the missing “V” of feathers near the tip of its right wing.

The red-tailed hawks will glide and soar for hours and have a black “bar” on the leading edge of the wing with a light colored lateral strip across the wings behind that. They’re also about a third or more larger than the red-shouldered hawks. Their call is the “traditional” hawk sound from every movie since the talkies started where the director wanted to establish the desert/Western scene with an audio cue. They’re also about a third bigger than their red-shouldered cousins.

It didn’t take the pair of red-tailed hawks very long to convince the red-shouldered pair that it was in their best interest to move on and find a territory elsewhere. Order was restored and we were back to listening to western towhees, house finches, mourning doves, and hummingbirds.

In the effort to catch one of the local hummingbirds in the golden sunset light, I often get photos that “miss” as they take off flit about, feed, fight, and harass each other.

It occurred to me that some of these “failed” photos actually had a certain beauty of their own, silhouettes of patterns both natural and artificial.

Part of it’s the light, but there’s also an element of a fractal design rendered in branch, stem, and leaf.

Perhaps these are the great pictures from that set and the ones with the annoying birds interfering with the patterns are the ones to toss.

It’s all a matter of perspective.