Had some excitement around the old “nature preserve” this afternoon. After shooting a squirrel off of my bird feeder with a BB gun, he ran around the front of the house – I thought. I went to look out of the front window and I found one of my Red-Shouldered Juvenile hawks sitting in the tree the squirrel usually climbs to sit and “lick his wounds”. Not knowing where the squirrel went I walked around the house looking out all of the other windows and I saw another squirrel on the ground under the feeder I put up in back of our house. Our juve flew to a side tree to keep an eye on him for awhile.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the house, away from the tree the juve was sitting in, I noticed a squirrel, presumably the one I hit with a BB and who was hiding from the hawk, run by the house to the back. I started watching him hop through the grass and as he got closer to the back of the lot behind the pond, the hawk swooped by to try to get a meal. Grabbed my binoculars to watch the show but I never saw the actual strike. I never did find out if they actually got a meal or not. They? Yes, the first juve was joined by, I’m assuming, his nest mate; they seemed to be helping each other and when I saw them they were hopping around on the ground behind the pond like they had grabbed something. I would have tried to get some photos of them but shooting through windows sucks and they probably would have flown away as soon as opened a door. So…
A little while later I went looking for them to see if they finished their meal and I found them sitting on a low overhanging branch in a tree next to the pond. Sitting side-by-side as pretty as can be! I gotta get the shot, window or not, but by the time I got the camera and ran back to the window one had flown away. So there was only one. Well, I did get the shot but as you can guess it’s pretty bad because I was shooting obliquely through the window which increases the distortion. Anyway, here is the photo of brother #1:
(I should note that this was done completely from inside my house in the cool air conditioning. I didn’t have to run around outside, in the hot, steamy, and raining weather all the while trying to avoid scaring the birds away!)