Subject: Re: Peregrines eating squirrels
Date: Oct 16 16:58:15 1996
From: Don Baccus - donb at rational.com


Tom Foote:

> Don McKenzie, Emeritus prof of Biology at Lewis & Clark, reported
> some time ago that he routinely watched a GHO nest outside his
> office window in a big fir..he said during nesting season, one or the
> other of the owls would bring in a full grown cat about once a week..

Well...the Lewis & Clark campus, which abuts Tryon Creek State Park,
doesn't quite meet the "urban" criteria - it's "urban" in the sense
that Seattle's Discovery Park is urban (and urban forest, in this
case).

Still, though, that's pretty cool. Wouldn't surprise me if there were
a lot of feral cats in that neck of the woods, and there are scattered
homes and developments in the area, including the log house I was
raised in (yes, I was raised in a log house - that explains why I'm so
strange). We used to have things like coyotes, deer and pheasant
around therre when I was a kid, but housing density's increased a lot
in that neck of the woods since then, though coyotes have been making
a comeback after mostly disappearing for a decade or so from the area.

Who knows, though, maybe the owls will figure the city out, eventually.
Last fall we had a goshawk living in downtown Portland for a few weeks,
apparently a migrant juvie that saw all the pigeons and decided the
Park Blocks were groovy.

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, at http://www.xxxpdx.com/~dhogaza