My 20 pounds of housecat is fairly incompetent as a predator. This is fortunate. I am allowed to have a birdfeed because my cat long ago gave up on trying to catch birds.
I would not feed the birds, as
I do, if they became easy prey to my cat.
A few days ago, I spotted a
small hawk perched my post and pole fence not far from the bird feeder. I failed to successfully identify the hawk,
but there are several similarly sized hawks that regularly prey on smaller
birds.
“Not good,” I thought to
myself. “Might be a scouting mission.”
Yesterday, as I stood near my
den window—one of the windows offering a view of my birdfeeder—a blur of motion
about six feet off the ground caught the corner of my eye. I glanced outside just in time to see the
hawk flapping away with a smaller bird of some kind in its talons. Likely a finch of some kind. A spray of dark feathers in the air slowly
sifted down onto the snow where I first saw the flash of motion.
The question now: do I want to operate
and maintain a daily buffet for a hawk?
— Mitchell Hegman
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