Subject: A dipper gets a pass by a hawk
Date: Sep 21 16:39:21 2004
From: Rob Sandelin - floriferous at msn.com


We (Students and I) were at Troublesome creek today, to the North of the
Town of Index. Sitting in the sun eating lunch one of the students spotted a
perched accipter, my best guess is a coop since it did not fit the size and
shape of a Gos, but it was not a good look and my bins were elsewhere being
borrowed. Not long after we saw it, it took off and did a power dive right
towards the middle of the creek. Its target was a dipper which neatly dipped
itself under the water well in advance of the hawk. To our surprise, the
hawk hovered over the river (I did not know accipters could even do this) as
if waiting for the dipper to come up. The dipper came up upstream which was
behind the hawk who was facing and looking downstream. The hawk eventually
gave up patrolling downstream and took off into the forest. The dipper then
serended us with its wonderfully burbling song. We saw the same hawk?
later, just as we were leaving, chasing a Robin through the trees.

In many years of river wandering I have never seen an accipter go after a
dipper.

Rob Sandelin
Naturalist, Writer

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