ADDED: Dialogue:
MEADE: Did you get video?
ME: No, stills work better.
MEADE: It was blinking.
ME: It could have been winking. Birds in profile. How do you know when they are winking at you?
January 18, 2013
Photo taken, just now, without getting up from my desk.
ADDED: Dialogue:
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30 comments:
Beautiful bird!
The bird is blinking, eh? How long until Chip Ahoy finds out about this?
Stay away from the pups. The Blonde may be in FL, but she can make a quick trip back.
If it's not smiling, it's not a wink.
Is it the Eye of a Hawkeye from Iowa like the Dear Abby/Ann Landers, the Hawkeye twins.
There must be a Gatsby sentence lurking here.
Cooper's hawk?
Over new year's I saw a bald eagle grab a duck, watched him sail to the top of a nearby oak and observed him devour it. Love birds of prey. Blood sports.
The other month we were at the park across from my school when a hawk hit a small snake on the ground. All feathers and commotion. Then the Hawk stood over it's prey and did the full Batman with it's wings covering and cloaking it's food looking at us dead straight in the eyes as if issuing a challenge. After a second it pulled back it's wings and flew off, dead snake in claws.
When he's pooped your car....that's when you know he's winking at you.
LordSomber said...
Cooper's hawk?
Yes. An adult. They've taken to cruising city-scape trees hunting for pigeons and other fat birds. Detroit and Dearborn have several nesting pairs..they get the pigeons that the Peregrines miss.
Hawks are big on the interwebs this week.
horrible, horrible freedom
That's a nice shot.
If a hawk winks at you, is it good form to yell "Fresh!" and hit it on the head with your purse?
Is it a Republican Congressbird? Then it blinked.
"Hawks are big on the interwebs this week."
Rush Limbaugh was talking about that last week.
I question whether that was not the plan -- to have a hawk kill the mouse they didn't want to kill on their own.
Birds in profile. How do you know when they are winking at you?
How do you know it's a whole bird? It could have been only half a bird.
Winking birds show a little leg.
I thought you stood at your desk.
wow, that is pretty cool. We have a nice backyard which has an almost always dry creek that feeds into Rock Creek and some neat woods. Because of that we get a lot of wildlife and I get very excited when I spot something unusual like that bird in your picture.
Cool picture!
She Who Must Be Obeyed was taking the garbage out one morning a couple of years ago and came face to face with a northern goshawk (similar to a cooper's but larger), sitting on top of the compost barrel with one of the neighbor's racing pigeons flayed open in the best Hannibal Lecter fashion. That was my fault, of course. Now the garbage waits until I get home from work.
wow, that is pretty cool.
Birds of prey know they're cool.
LordSomber wrote
Cooper's hawk?
Aridog wrote:
Yes. An adult.
And likely a female from the robust build, and at least four years old from the deep red of her eye. The eyes of accipiters begin with a golden hazel color and gradually change from hazel through shades of orange to a rich ruby color which they usually achieve around age four.
Cool! I don't think I ever saw one before -- not even a picture.
What we have around here (southern Indiana & northern Kentucky) is red-tailed hawks. They're sorta rust-colored all on the underside of the wings, plus the tail.
However, that hawk looks like a picture I just encountered while Googling around, of the "American Kestral or Sparrow Hawk" --
http://www.gardenclubofindiana.org/2012/onthewing8-05.htm
@ Ige --
Actually the Cooper's Hawk (Accipiter cooperi) is very common in your region, they're just not as conspicuous as the Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicenis). Buteos are typically still hunters, that is they sit high on an exposed perch, like a dead tree or a highway light stanchion, and search the ground using their powerful vision for signs of the small rodents they prey upon. Properly the members of the genus Buteo should be call buzzards rather than hawks, and the birds Americans typically call buzzards (“Black Buzzard”, “Turkey Buzzard”, etc.) should be called vultures instead. Only the accipiters – the Cooper's, the Sharp-Shinned, the Goshawk, etc. – should be called hawks. The true hawks are hunters of other birds, and stay under cover generally. We see them more often in the winter because the trees are bare, and because suburban folks often set out bird feeders which attract the species that hawks like to eat. Also, I believe the Cooper's Hawk is co-evolving with humans to become much more tolerant of our culture than has heretofore been the case.
The page you link to in your second post is a bit deceptive and the writers don't know much about their subject. The picture of the Cooper's Hawk on that page shows a very young bird, which has a quite different coloration from the adult. Also they perpetuate common confusion caused by our very inaccurate American nomenclature for predatory birds.
The Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus) is closely related to a European bird known as the Sparrow Hawk (Accipiter nisus), but is not related at all to the bird commonly called a sparrow hawk by Americans, which is a true falcon correctly known as the American Kestrel (Falco sparverius). Among the many problems and confusions of nomenclature is the fact that the taxonomic order Falconiformes (hawks, buzzards, falcons, eagles, kites, vultures) is a paraphyletic group, that is a group whose members are not evolutionarily related. For example the falcons (the American Kestrel, the Merlin, the Peregrine, etc.) are more closely related to the parrots than to any other member of the Falconiformes. The reason it looks so similar to a hawk (talons, hooked beak, etc.) is because of convergent evolution and not because of a shared ancestor.
(edited and re-posted for clarity)
How do you know when they are winking at you?
When they care more about punting than bunting?
That's a Henery Hawk, and he's looking for that barnyard dawg.
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