Author Topic: Backyard critters  (Read 104546 times)

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Offline GburgNatsFan

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Re: Backyard critters
« Reply #125: April 16, 2012, 04:18:04 PM »
Not so much angry... confident. Because Birds of prey... they know they're the sh!t.

There's not really a taxonomical difference between falcons and hawks, I don't think. Well, they treat them differently here than they do in Europe. Here hawks are falconformes, they are not in Europe. They are daytime, sight hunters.

American Kestrels (Sparrow hawks) are  tiny. Big, bad ass attitudes, but little bodies. Not what you saw.

Peregrine Falcons are bad ass and their range extends through the Chesapeake region. They feed mostly on water fowl and need a lot of territory, so they aren't a common sight.

I think the common ones on the eastern seaboard are the sharp shinned hawk (small), the Cooper's Hawk (bigger) and the Red-Tailed Hawk (big, too). You prolly saw a Cooper's Hawk or a Red-Tailed hawk if it was brownish.

There's a Cooper's Hawk in our backyard that regularly eats peanuts via the intermediary of pigeons, which it likes to drive into the picture window. Nasty.

Love these damn birds.

So basically I saw some kind of angry bird.  Got it :P