>I've enjoyed the stories about hawks' amazing feats. Any more?
>Irene

I've got an endless supply, having helped trap and band literally
thousands of hawks the past six years. I'd hate to bore people
though...

But, I'll run a couple by the group and if they find such stories
boring, I'll trust them to let me know.

We band during the fall migration, so a large proportion of the hawks
we observe and band are first-year birds, recently fledged, and often
adolescently awkward at certain raptorial skills. Minor things like
flying, stooping, hitting prey (or, in our setup, lure bird).

One good story involves a young male kestrel, and is a "wimpy hawk"
rather than "amazing hawk" story.

We use house sparrows to lure kestrels into bownets, where they are then
trapped and later banded and released, but house sparrows are a bit
intimidating to kestrels.

On this occasion I learned why! I lured this kestrel into the banding
station where it apparently bound to my sparrow lure, and held on as I
dragged the pair into the net (the sparrow is protected by a leather harness,
BTW).

I said "apparently" because things didn't look right. The kestrel was
screaming and began flapping its wings, odd behavior for a raptor trying
to subdue prey too large to fly off with! Before I could spring my trap
on the pair, the kestrel flew off. Curious, I ran out to see what was
wrong with this setup, and cracked up laughing. The house sparrow had
two beautiful male kestrel tail feathers firmly clamped in its bill!
The kestrel hadn't bound to the sparrow lure, the sparrow had grabbed the
kestrel by the tail! So hard that the kestrel could only get away by
yanking so hard it left the two feathers behind.

Imagine the kestrel's state of mind, being dragged along the ground by
its tail by a house sparrow! Talk about role reversal!

Sigh...poor kestrel was probably afraid to hunt birds for the rest of its
life.

Now, an incompetent but determined redtail story. Redtail flies over
our banding station, about 100 ft up, kites and inspects our pigeon
lure. Normally, once a redtail gets a good look our setup (hey, the bird
has a harness on it! It's on 200lb dacron fishing line! Check out those
mistnets! Something looks wierd here!) they scoot, but this fella took
the plunge.

Literally. Full vertical stoop - an exciting thing to watch!

Only one little problem - the redtail missed the lure by a country mile.
It apparently realized this when it was about twenty feet up, tried to
flare and got some good horizontal speed going, sailed over the lure
about five feet in the air, slammed into the ground giving rise to a
large cloud of dust, and slid - baserunner style - about ten feet along
the ground, finally coming to a halt when it slammed into the trunk of
a short, bushy little-leaf mountain mahogony. I was nearly as stunned as
the bird! Not exactly a "Wild America" image of the mighty hunter at work!

The redtail picked itself up off the ground, walked out from under the
large shrub, shook the dust off, saw the pigeon, and - apparently aware
of its own incompetence aloft - RAN over to the pigeon and hopped on
top of it. Imagine its surprise when, a fraction of a second later, the
bownet closed over its head.

I could go on like this for weeks - be careful of what you ask for,
Irene!

-Don Baccus-