Predators

The yard is still glazed. The ice crust is thick enough to walk on without breaking through. My dog treads carefully when chasing the squirrels up the trees and over the fence. Before everything froze so solid, I would watch her run through the snow/ice mixture, paws splayed out like small snowshoes, allowing her to keep on top of the surface. Her wolf ancestors did the same thing; her wolf cousins still do. At night, I can hear deer in the woodlot beyond the fenced yard, walking in the snow with a series of quick crunches as their sharp hooves break through the ice. If they do have to run, pursued by a wolf, say, or by a Lab/Collie mix protecting her territory from alien invasion, deer are at a serious disadvantage, speed negated by depth of snow. Xena may be a big puppy at heart and ever ready to play "find the ball" but, at a deeper level, one that she can't even begin to understand, she is pure wolf, hardwired in her DNA to pursue and bring down animals bigger than she is. Of course in the real world, wolves almost never work alone, and don't range along the fence line keeping barbarian hordes of deer and squirrels from overrunning her house; but she can pretend.

We have a Sharp-shinned Hawk working the feeders in my neighborhood. Ecologists call this "trap lining" for the methodical way in which a hawk moves from feeder to feeder along a one or two block area, like an old-time Hudson Bay Company fur trapper checking his sets. The hawk will hang around a feeder until it is either discovered by the local birds, who vanish, or it makes a kill. Sometimes I find a pile of grey and brown feathers under a branch where a hawk plucked and ate a feeder habitue' who was too slow to hear Mr. Darwin calling.

Sharp-shinned Hawks and their larger cousins, Cooper's Hawks and Goshawks, are Accipiters. These are forest birds with short rounded wings for agility and are tough enough to burst through brush and smaller tree branches in hot pursuit of their prey, mostly other birds. They are stealth hunters, stalking quietly from branch to branch until close enough to take a shot at the dicky birds clustered at the feeders. If they miss (usually the case with most predators), they will sit in full view for a few minutes, preening unruffled feathers, as if to tell the world they intended to miss all along. They remind me of my cats who, if they miss a toy or ball or mouse, will sit in the middle of the floor and wash for a minute or two just to show you that it was no big deal.

Accipiters are compact predators; Sharpies equal to a blue jay, Coops not quite the size of a crow. We have had one or the other every winter since we moved in. The one I saw today was immature as evidenced by the incomplete bars across the breast and yellow irises (the eyes turn red at maturity). The eyes are the most striking part - when you look into a hawk's eyes, they look back into yours. I don't know if it was sizing me up as a potential prey item or just writing me off as not a significant factor in its world. I like to think it was acknowledging me as a fellow Alpha predator, sharing the top rung of the food chain. It called a few times and took off, every movement telling me "I know you are there. I don't care. I'm leaving now. I will be back". It mosied down the block to the next house with a bird feeder in the yard and settled in to wait.