Tweeters,

In 2001 I gave the Forest Service two days and one night of my life to
survey Northern Goshawks and Great Gray Owls NW of Naches. I was
warned that while the Owls were harmless, the Goshawks might want a
piece of you. They gave me a large forest service map with ten or so
highlighted areas that had been determined to be prime Goshawk
locations. They also gave me a boom-box and a cassette tape. You find
the location, play the tape, wait 5 minutes, travel 100 yards, play
the tape, go another 100 yards and give em the Goshawk fight song,
until you have completed a grid of the area. With a compass and
altimeter, but no GPS, I had my hands full, but pretty much finished
the task. Not only was I not once attacked by these fierce predators,
I never noted a vocal response. Didn't get any owls either.

A year plus later I got my lifer Goshawk in a large cottonwood in SE
Arizona.

Two years after that we spent quality time with an immature bird on
Cape Cod.

A year later we had a fly-by on Salmo Mt.

That's it.

But wait.

There have been a number of times, the majority without optics, where I
noted an lone Accipiter soaring high in the sky over Pugetsoundsville
and assumed these were Cooper's Hawks. Silly Larry. I had a couple of
emails with Nelson Briefer and believe his "Accipiter Alert" is little
more than "Look to the sky", those soaring Accipiters are Goshawks.
Mr Briefer is convinced that this soaring is something Goshawks do, and
the other Accipiters pretty much don't. All the single soaring
Accipiters I've observed seemed too small for Goshawks, but size is
tricky at a distance. We may need a surface-to-air missile to collect
one.

That's it?

If it is, perhaps Mr Briefer would have been better off framing his
discussion as "Goshawks can be seen if you look in an unexpected
place", rather than "Goshawks are not as rare as commonly believed."

Larry Schwitters
Issaquah