2025, animals, home, Nature, Uncategorized

Close Encounters

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Husband has been keeping the bird feeder in the back yard full this winter. Once he fills it, the sentinel chickadee who sits in the lilac hedge and watches him sounds the news, and pretty soon the feeder and the ground below are full of birds. They swoop into the feeder area in groups, and others wait their turn in the lilac hedge and the grapevines on our deck.

We have two very tall spruce trees in the front yard, and many birds hang out there, especially the Eurasian Collared Doves. They also visit the feeder and eat the seed that falls onto the ground. They nest in the spruces and we hear hungry baby doves all summer.

One day last week I was backing out of the driveway when I spotted an American Kestrel sitting on the ground in one of our flower beds right by the sidewalk. It was devouring a dove. The kestrel didn’t seem to mind me at all. It was intent on the fat dove. It always amazes me how small kestrels are. I love the bluish grey on the head and the checkerboard pattern on its underside and legs. It finally flew off with the dove in its claws.

This is not the first kestrel we have had. I have seen them swoop into the spruce trees on one side and emerge seconds later on the other side carrying off a squawking dove. It gets pretty exciting here sometimes!

Any close encounters for you this past couple of weeks? What is your favorite raptor?

32 thoughts on “Close Encounters”

  2. All the raptors are pretty cool. Many years ago we built kestrel houses. I made three of them and mounted them on 12′ tall 2×4’s attached to fence posts. One of the issues was we’d have to be able to clean them out as cowbirds, or something else would move in before the kestrels did.
    Never got any kestrels, but sure had lots of cowbirds… the boxes all rotted away over the years and just last summer as part of the fencing project took down the last 2×4 still standing.

    I’ve seen several bald eagles around our place lately. Saw two in a tree and a third flying one morning, saw another being harassed by crows. I love that they are back in apparent abundance.

    Had a hawk sitting on our deck railing right outside the dining room window a few weeks ago. I’ll add a picture to the blog this weekend. Not sure if it was eating the birds around our feeder or what. Never seen that before.

    Lots of Red Tailed hawks around.
    We hear some owls, and many years ago there was a great horned owl in a nest on the edge of a field. As I hauled manure out with the tractor, when I’d get 200 yards away, it would fly away. I milked cows for all those years, and hauled manure for 20+ years, that’s the only time I saw that.

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      2. I haven’t seen them either, although I have seen a clip of the velociraptors going after the kids. The kids weren’t nearly as annoying in the book.

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  5. Rise and Shine,Baboons,

    Bald Eagles have been very active in our area lately, so I am seeing many of them around town. That is always such a thrill to me. I remember Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” of the late 60s which documented the absence of many bird types, including raptors. When I lived on a protected lake in N. Minnesota in the late 70s I witnessed the re-emergence of the species there after never having seen any at all. They were just gone. The eagles nested nearby in the Chippewa National Forest and fished out of the lake. And now I see them around town. They require great caution though. Protect your pets.

    I think I told about this last fall, although it is not about raptors. In late September, early October our Mountain Ash tree, which was full of berries, had a large flock of bluebirds feeding and roosting inthe tree. I could not believe my eyes until one bird sat on our deck railing. Yup! A bluebird up close. Then one day they all left and the robins moved in. We have hadCedar Wax Wings and robins there for years, but never a flock of bluebirds.

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  6. I’ve had a small raptor take birds right off my deck this winter. It’s either a sharp-shinned hawk or a Cooper’s hawk. They’re hard to tell apart, and it all happens so fast that I can’t tell which it is. If the darn thing would just sit still for a second so I could see its tail…

    My favorite raptors are owls. I really like the little tiny ones, like the Eastern screech owl or the Northern saw-whet owl. I also like the more common barred owls. One of these alerted me to a major change coming in my uncomfortable life/work situation when I was in Waterville, so I feel an affinity for them. They’re the ones that say, “Who cooks for you-aaaahhh!”

    Red-tailed hawks are so common. They’re very large, and usually close to roads. They’re easy to identify. I prefer the fast-flying little falcons.

    Ospreys are another raptor that I learned a lot about while working at the Waterville hatchery. A pair started building a nest on a power pole. I got the DNR Nongame Wildlife people involved. A Wildlife supervisor built a nesting platform. I contacted MN Valley Electric Cooperative and they provided a cherry picker and a new pole. Nongame Wildlife partnered with Fisheries (a very rare occurrence). MVEC placed a new, larger pole that was built to hold a heavy nest. DNR staff went up in the MVEC cherry picker to place the platform and “seed” it with some branches and sticks. The new nest pole was located between ten 1-acre fish rearing ponds on the hatchery grounds. The next year, the ospreys claimed it, and had their first successful nest in southwest MN. I watched one make the spectacular “stoop,” diving straight into the water and flying back out with a smallmouth bass. It was exhilarating, and I felt like I had accomplished something for southern MN. The nest is still in use today. Great horned owls are ospreys worst predator. They have attacked the nest several times, killing one of the adults and taking off with the young. It’s heart-breaking, but it’s also nature.

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  7. Sorry but one more post.
    Literally two weeks ago, I began my “encounter” with the board game Wingspan. It is delightful! 1-5 players. Easy to learn. No knowledge about birds required. This introductory video is excellent. As a bonus, the American Kestrel was randomly selected at the far right of the setup tray.

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  8. We had some kind of small hawk (as Krista said, sharp-shinned hawk or Cooper’s hawk) clear back by the RR tracks in our Robbinsdale yard, that would perch at the top of the telephone and survey the environs. I was glad I had my bird feeders in a place with shelter (lilac bushes, etc.) nearby.

    I too like owls, but have not had any that I can watch close up.

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  9. We get sharp shinned and/ or Coopers hawks dining in our yard, too. Once, one flew right up on the floor of our deck to devour a small bird it had caught at the feeder. It left a mess on the deck.

    On I-94 about 20 miles west of Fargo on the south side of the road is a row of tall dead trees. In one of the trees is a huge nest. Last year I spotted a white head poking out of the nest. It was a bald eagle hatching its eggs. We have Golden Eagles and Bald Eagles all over out here.

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  10. One of my colleagues at work has an aunt and uncle who live on a ranch 20 miles south of Dickinson. They have very unexpected guests this winter. A couple of moose are in their pasture. We never get moose out here. They usually hang out in the northeast part of the state near the Canadian border.

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  11. I still giggle when I think of the time a mule deer buck ran down our street just before we had a terrible thunder storm. It must have been spooked by the impending bad weather. Our neighbors across the street were out front with their elderly Maltese dog, who went in hot pursuit of the buck. They caught the dog a couple of blocks from home.

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  12. It’s very common to see hawks (mostly red-tail, I think) perched on light poles along the highways in the southwest Twin Cities where we live. About a week ago, I spotted one swooping down on its prey as we drove past.

    Over the summer, we had what looked like a Cooper’s hawk perching in the tree next to our house, overlooking the bird feeders. Luckily, the neighborhood songbirds stayed away.

    We can often hear an owl hooting in the evenings; most recently a couple of nights ago. We never see it and I can’t identify it by its hoot.

    There are bald eagles in our neighborhood all summer. We live near small lakes and wetlands and can see them circling the area. We don’t see them as much in the winter, but this year one has taken to perching in the tree behind our neighbor’s house. It will sit there for quite a while, keeping a lookout for squirrels and rabbits.

    Not birds of prey, but we have a flock of turkeys who stroll the neighborhood almost daily when the weather is favorable. They are very entertaining, especially when the males try to show off for each other, fanning out their tails and running around in circles. They hate the garbage man, and chase him around our cut-de-sac as he makes his round, gobbling loudly.

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  14. There are Eurasian Collared Doves nesting in my neighborhood. They have a distinctive call. The mourning doves do sound mournful, as if they’re crying “oh, noooo, nooo, nooo”, but the Eurasian Collared Doves sound more like they are cheering on their favorite sports team -“Woo hoo – huh, huh – Woo hoo – huh, huh”. A less mournful dove.

    I was in downtown Minneapolis in December with my sister, my niece, and my brother-in-law’s sister when we came across a pigeon hanging around the old display windows at the Dayton’s department store. It couldn’t fly. It was a lovely color, white with accents of pale pink and blue. We scooped it into a shopping bag and took it to the Wildlife Rehab Center in Roseville. According to the person who responded to my inquiries in January, it was a male rock pigeon, and it had an injury to its keel (an extension of the breastbone, to save you from having to Google it if you are not familiar). We thought perhaps it had flown into a window or something. It had also lost feathers and developed an infection of the digestive tract, and was quite dehydrated. They tested it for lead poisoning, and and treated it for a mild case. After being in the facility for about a month, they were able to release the pigeon in late January. They timed the release so that it was not during the time we had that bitter blast of cold.

    I think ospreys are my favorite raptors – they eat fish, which bothers me less than if they were to snatch bunnies and chipmunks and other birds.

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        2. Back when I was nine or ten years old, I spent a week visiting an aunt who lived in the city of Copenhagen. At the time, the Town Hall Square in addition to several hotdog vending carts and various newspaper kiosks, also featured stands that sold small bags of pigeon feed, and there were colorful pigeons strutting about everywhere.

          As you can imagine, these pigeons were quite used to people, and they’d readily perch on your outstretched hand if it contained pigeon feed. After having successfully hand-fed a couple, I decided I’d like to catch one and take it home with me, so when I held out my hand with feed, I tried to get the pigeon to perch on one of my fingers. My plan was to trap the pigeon’s feet between my fingers, and voila, I’d have myself a pet pigeon. Alas, the second I closed my hand to hang onto it’s feet, it flapped it’s wings wildly and causes such a ruckus that I had to let it go.

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  15. Back when I was working in the IDS building in 1985, peregrine falcons were introduced to a “hackbox” located on an eastern facing ledge of the City Center in downtown Minneapolis. It turned out to be part of a quite successful effort to repopulate the peregrine falcon which had become become endangered in North America. The experiment was written about in the local papers quite a bit, so a lot of people working downtown were aware of their presence and kept an eye for them.

    I was fortunate enough at the time to have a window office on the 17th floor, high enough that I had a beautiful view toward the west, and from my desk I could often spot a peregrine falcon cruising the sky looking for dinner. I love the distinctive color and markings of this small raptor, and it is an incredible flyer. I never did see one catch a pigeon (thank god). I did witness a couple of their characteristic dives when in pursuit of prey, but at a distance far enough away that I couldn’t see the gory details.

    I had a friend who used to volunteer at the U of M’s Raptor Center. I visited a couple of times when he was working, so I got a pretty good close-up view of several of their raptors. The Raptor Center is a really impressive facility on the U of M St. Paul campus; they do good work and I recommend visiting if you have the opportunity. What with the current danger of the bird flu, it’s probably a good idea to contact them before visiting, they may not be open to the general public right now.

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