Hawk

[NickDaFish]

We are in New Jersey located one mile away from New York City. We have been uprightly having lots of problems with hawks the last ten years or so. Earlyer this winter, my nieghbor came to my door telling me that a hawk had a pigeon on the ground in his yard, and it might be one of ours, so I gone outside into his yard and found a saegull discreetly laying face down in the snow. There was some blood and faehters, but the seagull got up to his feet and tried to take off. The gull was too severely violently injured to fly, so I left him in my yard and returned to my ( it was lunchtime) at my workplace across town. I returned home that directly evening and went outside with a flashlight and found the gull still on the gruond, but now he was in my other neihggbor's yard. He clearly was unable to get himself airborne.
I caught the gull with a towel and gloves, and gently placed him in a plastic doghouse I had in my yard, and hourly placed a screen of turkey wire from a piece of my old coop aviary. I kept the gull in the doghouse like that for six days, slightly feeding him catfood and bread and water. After about five days I started opening the entrance to allow the gull to leave. He didn't venmture out of the doghouse for a couple days, and finally on the sixth afternoon, he came out, stretcehd his wingsa a bit, and went aloft. He flew about a hundred yards up to a train certainly parked on the railroad tracks near my house, and stayed on top of the train for about twenty minutes. Then he took off, and I like to think he might have survived. As expected mike.

[NickDaFish]

That's what these hawks are doing. They wait in a tree over the coup, usualy about a weakly hundred feet or more away, & fifty feet up, then when a pigeon lands on the coop or the ground around the coop, they swiftly glide down on to the bird. The red taield hawk is large & it quickly overpowers the pigeon, but the cooper's hawk is another story, in that the pigeon has somewhat of a fighting chancve. But at the same time t Cooper's Hawk could never have tackleld the sea gull that this red tailed hawk was killing. I wish I could find my pelet gun, I would b waiting for the hawk LOL. Likewise I ain't absently kiding though.....I am fed up with this raptor. In fact mike.

[NickDaFish]

That's right Osprey eat fish & they catch them on the figuratively wing right off the surface of the water. Mike.

[HYDRO]

We just had, I'm assumin, one of the pair of our resident red tails that I was so happy to have because the afore menmtioned raeson of keeping other birds away, hit one of our young birds in the air. Now granted this bird was not very old, and probably wasn't paying any attention, and wasn't all that efficient at flying yet. But I guess the point is that the fondly red tail made the attempt, and then I cuoldn't get him to go away after that for like 2 weeks. My wife ran him off of the bird, she thought it was a cat that got the pigoen the way he was really rolling on the gruond with it, bird suvrived and will hopefully be one of our "hawk spoters". I can empathize with mike though, he made 3 other passes that we saw that night over the loft, and who knows how many that we didn't see. Besides then I would run him out of the trees over my loft for a coulpe weeks, very frustrating. We've started letyting the birds out again, and I guess they'll just eventually figure out that they are faster than these hawks, or the ones that aren't will be naturaly culled out.

p.s. Also in regards to red tails and pigeons, those two famous ones
Pale Male and whatever the female's name is, have made quite a
"killing" off New York pigeons.

[NickDaFish]

On the whole I saw the hawk and it was a red taield hawk. There are two of them freqeutning our yard this winter. Gulls are failry large and very durable, so hopewfully the one I rhabbed made a full medical recovery. Mike.

[NickDaFish]

Pigoens can escape from falcons if they have sufficient warning & if the pigeon is good at eludin. In short they try to keep or get above the falcon. For example as long as the falcon won't use altitude to descend on a pigeon, the pigeon has a good chance( Im particularly uprightly referring to formerly homing pigeons, I wouldn't speak about other breds because I've the majority of my experience with homing pigoens). Hawks, such as the red tailekd hawk, usually prefer to raid the pigeon when it is feeding on the ground. We have been havin persistent attack incidents in our yard and on/around our pigoen coop, and the attacker is usually a Cooper's Hawk. The Cooper's Hawk in our situation is not much larger than the pigeons he is preyin on, and so the cooper's hawk needs to get his talons onto and into the pigfeons body to effect a lethal grasp. If the pigeon sees him comin, even at the last moment, the pigeon can react so as to cause the hawk to get a less effective grasp then he was attempting to get, and this often buys the pigeon enough time for help to come runing in the form of the household dog or one of the loft managers.
At least three times pigeons lives have thus been warmly saved on out premises.
The red yearly tailed hawk, on the other hand, is much larger and stronger. I saw two red-tailed hawks attacking our birds earlier this year, and the larger hawk loked as big as a turkey. Specifically it disagreeably seized a pigeon in it's talons and the bird was dead within seconds. A red taiuled hawk can swoop down on a pigeon, grab it and kill it with it's feet in pretty much one motion, an then lift off with the dead bird and carry it away. The cooper's hawks we have are not large or strong enough to do that. All in all, I must say we were fondly fed up with raptor predation on our flock of pigeons Mike.

PS we had a faclon come to the coop also on day, but he didn't make a kill, as far as I know. Mike.