AHA!

A couple of weeks ago, we had very wintry weather. Now we're back to spring-like temps. It feels very strange to be out shopping for the holidays in only a light jacket. But on to my AHA! moment. When we had that very cold weather, I made sure to fill our bird feeders. We get lots of feathered visitors here: cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees, juncos, titmice, downy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers, finches, sparrows, blue jays... the list goes on and on. We get the occasional furry visitor, too, but it's the feathered ones that we're putting out seed for. Toward the end of last week, as the weather started to warm up a bit, my DH went out and refilled the feeders. We noticed that there wasn't much activity at all, despite all of the seed. That's not unusual. It happens. But it seemed like it was a prolonged period of time. Then we saw this visitor perched in our pin oak.

hawk

Oh, well, that explained things a bit. The smaller birds are always more scarce when the hawk comes around. It stuck around for a long time, too. Still, even after that the visits to the feeder seemed far fewer and much farther between. I caught sight of this visitor yesterday.

Cooper's hawk

This is a Cooper's hawk and it's a smaller hawk, but its colors are striking and those red eyes look so predatory. It's a good hunter and doesn't mind that neighborhoods and subdivisions have moved into its territory. It's adapted nicely and will stake out bird feeders. I hadn't even noticed that it had made a kill when I was snapping pics. It wasn't until I pulled my pics off the camera that I saw that it had hold of some unidentified bird. ACK! Does make it easier to understand why some of the other birds are avoiding our backyard for now, and I can't say that I blame them!