“Come here quick!” always startles me—especially coming from my wife, Marge. Is there a fire on the stove, a flood in the bathroom, or something worse? But when followed by “You have to see this!” my heart rate settles back down. What I had to see, on Christmas morning, was indeed something to see. Standing on the step leading to our garage was a large immature northern goshawk pulling the feathers from a “snowbird”—a junco it had just captured and killed.
Quickly grabbing my camera, I was able to catch a series of shots as a little bird was becoming an outdoor Christmas dinner for a big bird—while a much bigger bird in our oven was being prepared for our indoor Christmas dinner: carnivores all.
My bird book says that this hawk of the forest is rare or uncommon, but in our yard it’s the most common predator to come our birdfeeders—hence adding another meaning to “birdfeeder.” Our yard has been supplying feeders of this particular species now for about four years. It’s a hawk in the accipiter family, raptors that usually inhabit the woods and feed on small birds and mammals. The other hawk families are the buteos, which are the open land soaring hawks like the red-tailed hawk, and the harriers, which hover close to the ground like the marsh hawk.
Lytton Musselman (the “Bible Plants” professor whose site I have linked to from WOC) and I had a run-in with an adult northern goshawk late last spring while hiking in an old-growth patch of red pines in northern Michigan. Apparently it was a female who had young on the ground somewhere near us, and she followed us and screamed at us for almost two hundred yards—finally bidding us good riddance with a pass about three feet above our heads, the whoosh of her wings making us both duck. We left the woods with great admiration for some stately native red pines and a very bold bird.
So from my experience, I wouldn’t consider the northern goshawk either rare or uncommon. It’s scientific name is Accipiter gentilis. If that has anything to do with “gentle,” I’d call in a definite misnomer!
See you outdoors!
Dean
December 29th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Yes, Dean, you may be writing a new definition for “birdfeeder”!
My wife and I had an experience a few years ago when a family of red-tailed hawks made their nest-home in a tall Poplar tree in our yard. The hawk couple raised a chick and taught it to fly right there in our yard. My wife was able to video tape some of the action which we enjoy watching to this day.
We contacted the Carolinas Raptor Center and told them of our experience, and they replied that we must have a wonderful habitat at our house for a hawk family to do that. We don’t try to make too many beauty improvements over what came naturally (actually I’m a cheapskate) so we welcome all kinds of critters to our place.