Sharp-shinned Hunter

My, what sharp shins you have. Note a fortuitous blade of grass for comparison.

In the wilds of,...my front yard, the hunter became the hunted. Cliche, but true, all conveniently presented on a grassy lawn with no obstruction, and anough time to grab my camera.

I was just arriving home, when I heard a violent screeking, and looked over to see a small hawk pinning a starling to the ground by my doorstep. In no mood to share her prey, she flew over to the neighbor's yard, where it became evident that this was one starling no longer singing its foreign songs, and the racket was the hawk's victory chant.

Mine! Mine! Mine!

"She?" Probably, based on the word of the Fish and Wildlife biologist who I sent these photos to. Juvenile, perhaps. Smaller than a Coopers, which would make it a Sharp Shinned Hawk in these parts. A native culling a flock of invasives. One down, thousands to go.

Hawk struck starling a few times for good measure, but was not really eating it. More of a dance: lowering its wings over the kill, flipping it's tail up, turning, stamping. And screaming all the while. She kept an eye on me lest I look too hungry, but kept it up for 66 seconds (thanks, digital camera for the time-keeping) before...

No bird for you, alien feline.

This is just one of the neighborhood cats (the ferals mostly fall to coyotes, I think), but to watch it come in, fast and low, ready for a pounce after the run, was to see the hunter that lives in most house-cats. It came out of nowhere (OK, probably the alley behind me), answering the dinner call. Was it like me, thinking it heard a bird in distress? Or have the cats learned the hawk's "I killed a freakin' starling!" song? This unwild-cat was probably not ready to hunt the hunter, but would steal a starling if it could.

This time, it could not. But it did make me wonder about how this works out on the big scale. I mean, a huge flock of starlings in the fairly open setting of single family homes placed at about 8 to the acre in 1950 may (despite their European roots and havoc wrought on native birds) be a boon to the bird-hunting hawk. But how many times does the native raptor make a kill only to have it taken away by a cat? Or, how much of a hawk's time is spent eluding pets hungry for yet another hand-out? The massive toll of cats directly killing wild birds has only recenltly become clear (billions, by the way, if not billions and billions), but what about the effects of harrassment and competition on native predators?

Late arrival, eating nothing.

Off on a tangent, as usual. But in deference to the internet (for once), I did want to post some cat photos, and also to rant about something. Maybe cats have little or no effect on hawks' well-being, and although it could be said that the human tendency to clear forest, erect power-pole perches, and attract rodents (and scads of starlings) could benefit some raptors, our net effect is not so kind, what with overall habitat loss and diminishment of the native prey to which they adapted since time immemorial. Our footprint stomps out more native species than the cats, and after all, they would not be here without us, or hera and feral without our cavalier neglect.

Hopefully, by now, nobody is even reading this post. The hawk-photos were the point. The cat-blogging? Not so much.

Eagle in Flight

American Eagle, Carefully Skirting Canadian Airspace

There are plenty of eagles in the Northwest, but seeing them hasn't grown dull. Instead, ubiquity makes it easier to appreciate the uniqueness of some encounters. Rather than a generic "I saw an eagle!" exclamations, stories emerge. A pair of eagles having conversation in their surprisingly little-bird voices. One hunting bird, hovering and eyeing a fish I could not see. The shrieking cacaphony of a gull flock as a massive eagle dove in an nabbed one of their cousins. The slacker eagle on a pile of gravel at a port, doing nothing in particular for as long as I could stand to watch.

I really like watching them fly. Even from a great distance, when size is hard to guage and the bird is nothing but black silhouette, the strength is evident. Neither as the crow flies, nor as the heron slowly flaps. A few times, I've seen them carrying fish. After capture and liftoff, they tend to grab the fish with one talon in front of the other, orienting the fish fore and aft in a streamlined grasp.

Usually, the eagle is too far off or too long gone by the time I get out the camera (just missed getting one passing 40 feet overhead last week). But a few weeks ago on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I got the shot above. It had something, but not the usual fish grasp. I viewed the shot, zoomed way in, and saw this:

 

Un-lucky duck.

Nevermore

Corvidae are pointellism-resitant

I posted this shot, unaltered, earlier, somewhere. That day, a family of crows were pecking at the Virginia piedmont clay, reddening their beaks toward some unkown end. Cranking up the saturation on this shot makes it both more magical and real. I like the way the crow holds it's form while the leaves blottify. The leaves come and go, but the crow sticks around, her young and then his perching and pecking through woods dancing from growth to decay and back.

Ravens don't like having their photos taken, so I got no nevermore. The evermore of the common crow is enough for a non-poet, dirt-digger, woods-walker.

Watching Bird Watching Art

"X never marks the spot." -Indiana Jones

This could be anywhere, but it is in Scottsville, VA. I just happened through, and it must have been Arts Walk or something, because here was this pigeon with an elaborate installaton.

Sure, what people noticed first was the massive scaffolding surrounding a large lone building, a brick of red in a crochet of scaffold rust. Especially nice against the Spring-greened dike and trees stretching out behind.

Then, perched in a pinnacle of empty panes, there stands the artist. In the crux of the X, smack-dab at scaffold-center stands an iridescent neck flanked by grey shoulders, rising from sleekness against darkness of the warehouse cavern. And atop this oiled rainbow of a neck, a head sharply grey, whetted by an eye piercingly orange, an orange borne of the saturatallucinated union of the brick and rust all around.

The artist glances one way then the other over and over, one eye always focused right on you. Nobody can explain how the pigeon simultaneously looks into each eye of everyone below, but it happens nonetheless. Meanwhile, the profile either reflects or parallels the pigeon's clever pecking of a pigeon-profile void in the pane to our left. Juxtaposition of the breast curve--a sublime, eloquent line depicting beauty all puffed-up and proud--with the shattered lines converging at the head (is that a woodpecker?) is nothing short of brilliant. 

Meanwhile, above and to the right, we see Pigeon's nod to the landscape. A mountain profile appears in the broken corner pane. Sophisticated as this installation surely is, a moment of simple representational art is not beneath it. A certain amount of self-mockery appears to be part of this Scottsville aviant garde piece as well: the artist's feet are a hilariously awful color. Just as the eye-orange clinches the artist's brilliance as a colorist, the scaly alcoholic-clown's-nose colored feet establish this pigeon as a humorist.

So, Bravo Scottsville Pigeon. You took a ruin and made it a font of creativity. You showed us that Pigeon-Americans are not just garbage-scrounging winged rats, and I think you showed those snooty NY birds a thing or two about real art.




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Bird, Watching

I've been in the Eastern US for the past couple of weeks, spending some time in woods just waking up from Winter. Just about a year and 3,000 miles from the Watercolor Spring post, these woods have a similar open grey lattice, dappled lightly with the colors of emerging leaves, but here there are so few evergreens that you can see much farther. 

In the forests and orchards, birds abound now, and I could not help but watch them. Long ago, I worked for a local Audubon Society, running a small bookstore and learning about birds as I went. I never became a Birder, that species of naturalist obsessed with amassing the longest "life list" of species observed, often as not, through massive and expensive scopes. Yes, I've seen some cool birds in remote and exotic locales, but mostly because I was working there, not because I'd planned a trip to see the birds. If the bird is pretty, or doing something interesting, it doesn't really matter to me whether it is rare; what it eats or is eaten by--how it fits into it's ancient or adopted ecology--ends up being just as important as whether it qualifies as a rara avis.

So, this one was worth watching. It's a thrasher (a species that sticks in my memory because of it's punk-sounding name and it's virtuoso voice), neither rare nor far afield. I sat in an orchard on the Blue Ridge, appreciating the blossoms when it's rusty back came into view. Unlike most birds, who know to dart away or duck behind a branch as soon as the camera comes out, it just sat there while I took a shot, and another, moved around to get a better view, and even when I stepped closer. For about 15 minutes, this continued, and it was aware of me, but not inclined to take flight. It was watching me as much as I was watching it.

Later on, wandering through the woods, I came upon a family of crows, also wandering through the woods, pecking through last Fall's leaves. Through long experience with jealous farmers and rock-wielding boys, they made sure one was always watching me, and kept their distance. No unobstructed posing, no sitting still while I got closer. But also, no stopping what their foraging sweep through a Virginian forest floor. Like the guard pictured above, they were hitting the ground hard enough to poke through the leaves and into the red piedmont clay. Like the sentinel pictured above, they kept their beaks open, but said nothing; maybe they were cocked and ready to snap up bugs, maybe they were panting away the heat. 

My limited bird brain cannot say for sure what the thrasher or the crows were doing. All I know is that they watched me watch them.