January 12, 2009

Drama in the wilds of my backyard

A really interesting thing happened this afternoon. I was sitting in our screened-in back room when I heard this crashing-squawking-thrashing kind of sound. Looking up I saw a small hawk (or it may have been a falcon??) dashing out of an overgrown palm tree with a dead dove or pigeon in his claws!!! It flew right over our pool and landed in the huge pine tree that hangs over our fence, feathers all raining down and more thrashing. Then Maggie sat out there and kept seeing it fly from our palm tree to the overgrown one two houses down. There must be 10 or so pigeons nesting in there...disgusting.

I am now afraid to let our little dog out in the yard without a guardian with her! Not sure what to do. Charles said if he's taking out the pigeons, he is for it. We are over-populated with them here. They love to nest in the old palm fronds that fall over and hang down the trunk of the tree.

Drama everywhere these days.

(after looking up the images for both kinds of birds, I think it looks more like a falcon....yellow crook beak and smaller than a hawk)

3 comments:

Father Rich said...

Yeesh! Scary!

Father Rich said...

Oh, that was me, Joann, not Fr. Rich. :-)

Alida Sharp said...

Awesome... sounds like something I would make my kids research and write a report on if we were still homeschooling!