More than 30 years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I got a
call from a friend who worked in the office of the local Audubon
chapter. She had had a call from a local who lived "on the hill". This
woman was not only a classic "little old lady"; she was also a very
influential member of the administrative arm of the Cooper Ornithological
Society. And she was tough. I was asked to call her, and I did that.

It turned out that she had a White-throated Sparrow at her backyard
feeder, and she was concerned because she also had seen a Sharp-shinned
Hawk in the vicinity recently. She had been (properly) advised that I
knew how to trap things like Sharp-shinned Hawks and asked me to get
right up there and do that! Refusing -even hesitating- was out of the
question.

Today, with facilities like Tweeters, a White-throated Sparrow on the
Pacific Coast is no huge thing, as we know. But in the late fifties
(well, maybe 39 years ago) such a thing was a major rarity, nothing to be
trifled with. I agreed to try to trap the Sharp-shinned Hawk, and set
about to assemble my tools. That took some time, during which I received
many additional calls, with horror stories. The good news was that the
rare sparrow was still around; the bad news was that the hawk was, too.

It got to the point, two or three days later, where I just didn't answer
my phone. Finally I had all my nooses in a row, so to speak, and got up
the hill to the monarch's house. I knocked. She opened the door, and I
identified myself.

The details of her response have not survived in my now declining memory,
though perhaps for reasons other than age. Her outburst was, I remember,
quite pyrotechnic; decidedly hot, rather than warm.

I had finally got there only two hours after the hawk had not only caught
the White-throated Sparrow, but had killed, plucked, and eaten it on the
railing of the imperious dowager's back porch, entirely in her view.
>From that point on, I always sat in the last row at Cooper Club meetings
when I spotted her in the room. Now certainly an angel, she may still
be looking over my shoulder.

In the years since, I have *always* attempted to take my feeder "to that
next trophic level". In the winter of 1973-74 a second-year female
goshawk headquartered a the edge of my property in Tumwater. She sat in
a since harvested maple at the southeast corner, and she did that most of
the winter. Her behavior might have had something to do with the
availability of pigeons from my barn, and there were times when certain
of those pigeons were especially available, strangely lingering in a
corner of the garden.

Steve Herman-