Hawk Snacks

This is a picture of our bird feeder in the back yard.  It usually has a lot of little birds eating from it and we all enjoy watching them.  Big doves come and eat what falls from the feeder, and in winter we get some woodpeckers in the yard.  Three times in the past year or so I have seen a hawk sitting on a wire that is strung right by the bird feeder.

The last time he came was a couple of weeks ago.  Derek said, "What bird is that?  It's big!"  It was a hawk, and I told him that I had read that it is bad to have a hawk by a bird feeder because they eat the little birds as snacks.  The whole family happened to be in the room, and they decided they'd better scare off the hawk, even if he was fun to watch.  We like the little birds.  They banged on the window -- no response, Connor opened and slammed the back door to go along with the window pounding -- the hawk just turned to watch.  Connor went outside figuring maybe that would scare it.  The hawk took off toward Connor -- and swooped and grabbed a little bird from the bush by the porch.

Connor yelled, and Derek commented that it was like having the nature channel in our back yard. Thankfully, the hawk hasn't returned, at least when we were looking, and plenty of birds have eaten from our bird feeder since then without becoming hawk snacks.