Saturday morning, North Seattle:

Male (age?) and female (adult) Sharp-shinned and male (adult) Cooper's and
female Merlin (age?) and several crows and Steller's Jays mixing it up for
>1 hour in and around my back yard. Unbelievable activity, with
screamingly fast chases through the trees. It would have been interesting
to tally who chased whom, but I was too mesmerized to think of keeping
track. I have seen the jays harassing Sharp-shins many times, and it was
noteworthy that they stayed clear of the Cooper's. Even the crows didn't
chase the Cooper's as persistently as they do Sharp-shins (maybe they were
just weary of all the fun). At one point, the Cooper's displaced a
Sharp-shin from the most prominent perch, the top of a leaning hemlock, and
just seconds later the Merlin appeared in a power dive and displaced the
Cooper's. It all left me with my mouth hanging open.

The last sighting was when the Cooper's came in and sat on a maple branch
in the open only 20' from the window and watched a couple of gray squirrels
that were under the bird feeder for a few minutes. Neither the hawk nor
the squirrels seemed concerned with each other, rather to my surprise, but
the hawk did make a half-hearted run along the ground toward another
squirrel in the neighbor's yard, then flew away and the squirrel came out
from under the hedge immediately. Reminded me of when a cat chases a
squirrel, and both of them know it's not serious.

To me, it was fascinating that I was home all day but, after this flurry of
activity, never saw a hawk again.


Sunday morning, same place:

No accipiters, but 2 Merlins chasing each other in an out of a tall
Douglas-fir, with much high-pitched cackling.

I hope most of them were migrants, or I don't imagine there will be many
smaller birds left in the neighborhood!

Dennis Paulson, Director phone 206-756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax 206-756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416