Category Archives: Critters

It’s spring. Love is in the air. So were a half-dozen red tailed hawks!

Earlier in the day there had been four red shoulder hawks harassing the ravens and crows, so when I first saw these six later in the afternoon I though it might be them. They were pretty high up there.

But as they started to come down lower and pair off a bit it became clear that they were red tailed hawks.

They settled in, circling and soaring about 500-600 feet up.

Then all of a sudden this one buzzed me at about 50 feet. It was like the “sneak pass” at a Blue Angels or Thunderbird airshow.

I wasn’t complaining!

It gave me a great opportunity to get some much better pictures.

I was also looking for the notch missing from the wing of one red tailed hawk that we’ve seen for a couple of years. I didn’t see it.

I don’t know if that means that the bird that had the notch of feathers missing grew them back, if they just weren’t here today, or if they didn’t make it through the winter. These might be their offspring. I’ll keep looking, it was quite distinctive.

One one that had buzzed me climbed up with the others. I guess they figured that I was mostly harmless.

They were dancing and coming together in what I assume is a mating ritual. Every now and then a couple would seemingly lock claws and fall for a ways before releasing each other.

Mating? Fighting? Both? I don’t know. But they were going fast when they were doing it, so I got a LOT of blurry, unuseable photos!

They are magnificent animals and it’s spectacular to see them!

I hope that I get more chances to see them up close. And when we find “The Forever Home” I hope it’s someplace that has its own population of hawks and other raptors!

The hummingbird feeder attracts other critters. I thought that it would only be hummingbirds because of how the thing is designed, but it hasn’t slowed down the squirrels, the house finches, the towhees, and the hooded orioles.

I had just gotten up and went to the kitchen sink and saw this at the feeder. That’s *NOT* a hummingbird. Slightly smaller than the hooded orioles, much larger than the house finches. Different tail than the squirrels.

Moving to where it’s not so backlit and fiddling with the cell phone photo settings (I figured that I had only seconds before it saw me and flew away) it was obvious that it was a downy woodpecker!

It did spot me, but didn’t immediately take off. I’ve seen downy woodpeckers around every now and then, but I’ve never seen it at the feeder.

It took its time and as you can see, it pretty much cleaned out the feeder. There’s another feeder around the corner that seems to be still left to just the hummers, so they’ll live until I can get this refilled.

As long as I can keep the squirrels away. The chunky monsters tear down the vines climbing up there, then they swing on the feeders until it breaks and falls so they can get at the food. Evil, furry, little bastards!

I was out and about for the Sunday morning shopping when these guys asked if I had any spare trash.

These two were near my car when I got out. There were four more picking over what had fallen out of a trash receptacle or been left on the ground in the parking lot. They were LARGE birds.

These two were strutting around like they were line dancing and you can see that they were displaying the ruff of feathers under their chin. I’m no expert, but I’m thinking it was a mating display of some sort.

Given their size, the chin ruff, and those honkin’ huge beaks, these have to be ravens. I see a pair up in the trees behind our house, but they rarely come down to the ground, so I don’t always remember just how big they are.

Lovely birds! Beautiful! I think they’re spectacular.

Just don’t piss them off. They can recoginze and remember individual humans, they’re very intelligent (they can use tools, i.e., sticks to get bugs out from holes, problem solve like dropping stones into a vase to raise the water level to where they can drink, etc), they carry a grudge, and there’s some evidence that they can even pass that information on to others in their flock.

Hitchcock knew what he was talking about.