Red-Tailed Hunters

I feel the need to preface this post with a warning; if you are in the slightest squeamish, then perhaps this post is not for you. It might be better to skip forward to the next post, which will be very pleasant and all about my observations of hooded mergansers.

If you are not squeamish, then let's proceed where I left off with the previous post.


The return of the red-tailed hawks provided a welcome target for my lens. 


These predators are so well adapted to their environment. They are powerful yet graceful, fierce and yet can be incredibly patient.


The thought did occur to me the next day, as I watched one of the two red-tailed hawks, that I had never observed the hawks with a kill. 


I mean, sure, I had seen many failed attempts but never actually catching anything.


No sooner had the thought crossed my mind when the red-tailed hawk swooped up to a perch directly to my left with, unfortunately, the sun behind it.

The red-tailed hawk focused on the mallards, who had already escaped one attack by diving underwater and then the hawk checked me out.


Something in the undergrowth, to its right, caught its attention. 

I know that hawks can perceive a greater spectrum of visible light than we can. What appeared to be leaf litter and twigs to me was something else in the eyes of the red-tailed hawk.

Down it glided through branches and twigs, visibly stalling its descent with feathered fingers spread wide, holding onto the air.

The red-tailed hawk landed out of camera shot from my position, behind fallen tree limbs. I had to wait in the hope that the hawk would move up to a perch, and it did. The hawk came to rest on a fallen tree with not just one or two but three rodents in the grasp of its talons.


After much debate from the red-tailed hawk and a great deal of wriggling from the rodents, the inevitable happened, the hawk dropped the mice.


Down went the mice, shortly followed by the red-tailed hawk and again completely out of camera shot. I needed a better position, preferably with the sun at my back. I edged my way over the fallen tree trunks and branches, keeping one eye on the hawk who was undecided on which rodent to eat. It peculiarly paced back and forth between two kills. One rodent had escaped.

The hawk finally settled on one rodent, and this is the part where you need to look away if you're squeamish. 

I'm not sure that this is the correct use of the term head-first, but it was indeed head-first.


And the head was shortly followed by the other body parts.

Looking from our prepackaged lives, it does seem brutal and barbaric, but it is survival in its truest sense. 


Now, where did I leave that other carcass?


Copyright © scottswildencounters.blogspot.com 2021 Scott Atkinson All Rights Reserved.

Location: Borden Wetlands, Kitchener, ON N2E, Canada

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