Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2003 20:29:22 EDT Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Elise Kreiss Subject: Squirrel Plays Chicken with Hawk MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit This morning, a squirrel on our back porch rail hurled itself on the storm door and slid down with a hideous sound of claws on wood and glass. As I watched from the kitchen window, it jumped back on the rail, and repeated the maneuver. Why? I don't know. But when I went outside to inspect the damage, I saw an immature Cooper's Hawk in a Catalpa, feeding. It eventually flew around to perch in a mulberry tree, where we watched it from an attic dormer window. It was there a long time - - long enough to get binoculars, reference books, cameras, and eventually, coffee. One curious sight was a squirrel who, tail twitching, would repeatedly climb up to within a couple of feet of the hawk, who watched it, but did not otherwise react; except once to lift its wings and lung out, aggressively. Hawks of North America spoke of a tawny neck as a field mark which I had not seen so nicely before. A second hawk quite briefly joined it before flying off alone. Unfortunately, with the departure of the first hawk, there was the usual mad rush of birds, and a female Goldfinch fatally hit a window. Elise Kreiss Baltimore ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================