So yesterday, i got very excited thinking I saw a returning Turkey Vulture. But no, it was a lingering dark-morph Rough-Legged Hawk that hadn't gone back north yet. A superb living metaphor for the weather these days, I thought.14F outside right now, hopefully in a week or so it'll warm up, @gyrfalcon you're right across the lake from me, we probably have the same inaccurate weatherman
Ha ha!! My two would turn tail and run, but I had a kitten like that once who was charging a large male racoon when I ran in and grabbed her up. That time, the raccoon ran like hell, no doubt thinking he'd wandered into a lunatic asylum.
Yeah, looks like a Cooper's. See that abundant white fluff on the lower belly just before the tail? And the slight raised crest on the back of the head? If it looks a little small, that's because it's a male. Most people don't know this, but in all raptor species, the female is bigger than the male, sometimes by a lot.
Very cool experience. Yeah, that thousand-yard stare is something else. I confess to having at times scattered cracked corn on the ground specifically to attract Mourning Doves and therefore Cooper's hawks. Shame on me. (Obviously, I'm a raptor nut.)
If you want mourning doves just put out a typical bird seed mix. We have well over a dozen at our feeding station every day, along with the cardinals, sparrows and chickadees we wanted to feed. We also see blue jays and squirrels show up for breakfast.
Yeah, I have loads of them where I am now, but mourning doves on the feeder are much less likely to be targeted by Cooper's Hawks, who prefer their dinner to be shuffling around on the ground. It's also nice to lure the doves away from the feeder with its more expensive seed and onto the ground for the cracked corn, they're such pigs.
If you get a pole feeder system that can be put out away from tree branches, deck railings and other things squirrels can jump from, and then add a squirrel baffle on the lower part of the pole, it'll take care of the squirrel problem. I have a pole about 8 feet tall with four "arms" with hooks at the top I hang tube and suet feeders from. It also has a platform feeder about five feet up, and underneath that is a wide tubelike thing that completely takes the squirrels out of the picture. The platform is too high for my cats to reach easily enough to get a bird, so they gave up on it after a few tries. (There are so many delicious rodentia around here to hunt and chew, they rarely even bother with birds.)
