A New "Pet"

Can you call them pets if they use your backyard for a home and don't really know you exist? I'm going to. I love pets and at the current time we are strangely low on them. Only two labs, the Aunt's Irish wolfhound and one parakeet. No more cat, no more chickens...

Anyway, back to the new "pets." We have hawks nesting at the top of the tallest cypress in the yard! I haven't been able to figure out what kind yet. EE says red-tailed hawks and the voice on the Cornell bird site sounds similar. But the outline of the red-tail is much stockier looking than the outline of the one I studied yesterday as it flew above the yard. That leads me to believe it is some kind of bird-eating hawk rather than a vermin-eating hawk like the red-tail. (That's what the Cornell bird site can do for you--make you sound like you know what you are talking about!) I do know there is a hawk called a sharp-shinned hawk that is common on the central coast, but the voice didn't sound at all right.

The pair has been calling and calling and swooping in and out of the top of the tree. It is hard to really see what is happening up there, even with the binoculars, but once I saw that the hawk that flew into the tree had something in its talons. Are there babies? Just eggs? Can't tell.

I wish I knew what they were saying. They are calling so loud you can hear them all over the neighborhood. I wonder if this has happened before. I think I would have noticed all this screeching and swooping. I have seen hawks in the yard before, but not this evidence of nesting. Then again, maybe I am just being more observant.