I wouldn’t want to be the one to anchor it up there!
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Falcon bait!
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So… is it real or ?
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It’s Memorex.
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The look on the owls face is priceless.
Probably the same look on Parker Kingstons face when the cops rolled up to his front door.
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So… I feel obligated to follow up and let everyone know that after watching this “owl” for a minute or two, as I rode by the next day or two, I became convinced it was a statue.
Worse, after a week or so, I rode my bike by to find there was an additional “owl” on a different part of the roof:
Since I had corresponded previously with the owner of the house, I emailed along my first reaction (the initial 2 seconds of this video):
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This was taken less than an hour ago.
He was eating something in the field just beyond our fence. I managed to get this picture, once I stopped being dumbfounded by seeing this guy. The timing was purely accidental on my part.
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Kestrel?
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Mount Olympus in the late afternoon after a March dusting of snow:
First homegame for the Baseball Utes at their new stadium, foothills south of Emigration with the last rays of day in the left background:
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Mrs CCU says it is a Red Hawk. She got better pics on our real camera vs mine on my cell. It looks similar to this pic:
I’ll see if I can’t get the pics off the camera to share in the near future. It was really cool to see.
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As promised here are a couple pics taken with our “good” camera of the hawk. It is a Red Shouldered Hawk per our bird book, and google lens.
As you can see, they look almost exactly like the hawk in my previous post.
I’ve seen this bird around our neighborhood over the previous month. I was never able to get a pic because I was driving. Finding it just outside of our yard was one of the neatest things I’ve ever seen. It is a very pretty bird. This is also a strong reminder to us and our neighbors to keep your small pets indoors or very much under supervision.
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Oooh! Hawk photos, I have one of those! We have a seagull problem here, so a falconer was hired to chase them away from various buildings around town. I got to say hi.
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I was an apprentice falconer in training as a teenager… but I never got a bird, my dad wasn’t crazy about the idea (understandably). My parents crapped a brick when Fish and Game showed up to inspect my coop. Prolly should have told them. Ha.
CCU’s neighbor looks like a red-shouldered hawk, in the same family as red tailed hawks that are everywhere, but a little smaller. UteKing’s associate looks to have a redtail. Good, trainable birds, they’re everywhere.
This dude is using a goshawk to hunt ducks: https://youtu.be/Mp4A3g_j0sY?si=Gb2W5Q4tTw5i88jr
Goshawks are really aggressive, you basically just “launch” them off your fist at ducks, pheasants, rabbits, pigeons, even geese… but I’ve heard they’re hard to handle and sometimes attack the falconer. (Probably best that I diversified my hobbies away from falconry. lol)
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That one I believe is a Harris’s Hawk. (H)awkward name.
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When I was 9 years old, I made a low wattage light bulb heated incubator, as a science fair project. Each Easter, my mother would bring home “from a rural relative” some chicken or duck eggs, that we’d hatch, and, raise and play with the birds in the yard for the summer and in the fall take them to the rural relative. My mother had done the same thing as a youngster and loved birds as a result.
My younger brother, when he was about 10, brought home two purported Sparrow eggs that he and a friend had stolen from a nest above the Avenues in Perry’s Hollow (he actually knew they were Sparrow Hawk eggs). He hatched them using the incubator and my parents soon enough discovered what sort of birds we had in the house.
My father told my brother they were illegal, he could not keep them, but rather had to raise, and feed them, train them to hunt when they were old enough, and then turn them loose. It became a family project to learn all they needed to know to do so. The birds ate mostly mice, which my brother and his friend learned to provide, my mother made leather thongs and gloves to restrain and handle them, my father and I made a cage and a large relocatable perch to accommodate the birds, my brother and his friend learned to teach the birds to hunt and eventually they returned them to the wild. We watched them successfully hunt in Perry’s hollow, and knew they were OK.
The next spring, my brother and his friend stole a pair of eggs from a Red-tailed Hawk’s nest higher up the mountain, and hatched them in our basement without mentioning it to my parents. Once discovered, the same directive came down, and we repeated the cycle with two much larger birds.
I’ve always been fascinated with birds of prey as a result of those few years with falcons around the house. I really wish we had some photos of the birds and their accommodations but I think my parents were afraid of trouble from having the birds and avoided having any evidence.
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That is an awesome story that helps me feel less bad about what I put my parents through. The redtail 2nd chapter is exquisite. Your parents were extremely patient and broad minded.
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Orrrr, secretly wanted to raise birds of prey…
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What a great story! Maybe write a song?
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Perfectly fitting in the “cool pictures” thread.
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Very handsome!!!
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