I think of all the times I have wished for a video camera, today I wished
the hardest. I had time to kill before a field class so I took my coffee
and parked my rig in the Subway parking lot overlooking Lake Tye in Monroe.
There is a nice view of the lake there and in the little bit of landscaping
lawn there was a cottontail of this year. Tiny and cute. At first it hung
out in the beauty bark but after a bit it nibbled its way onto the lawn and
after a couple minutes it was eating clover in the middle of the lawn. I
had just thought to myself, little bunny don't you know you are on the
lunch menu? when I saw the Red tail. It was flying from the North and was
on a course to cruise along the edge of the lake and pass by the very
exposed bunny on the lawn. I thought about the video shot, first close up
to the cute little bunny (background some light fluffy happy music) then
pull the the shot to the hawk cruising closer (Dark vadar theme song)
Bunny, Hawk, Bunny Hawk.

When the hawk got to be in line with the bunny it was on the far side of the
lake and I was surprised that the bunny didn't react to it at all. I
thought for a second as the hawk passed that it had missed the bunny. It did
not. What it did next impressed me to consider hawks might be pretty smart
about their business. On the north side of the lawn where the bunny was
eating is a big wall of impenetrable blackberry, 7 feet or more tall. To
the south and east is the parking lot where I sat in my car and to the west
is some tall grass which goes down to the lake. The hawk circled the Tye
building, making a wide loop up the road and came at the bunny from the
north, flying low enough that the blackberry mostly shielded it from view.
I was figuring I was going to see, at close range, a hawk get a bunny for
breakfast.

At the point where the hawk rose up to clear the blackberry thicket the
bunny figured out its peril and after twitching its head in a bit of
indecision it bolted for the tall grass. If it had tried to make it to the
blackberries it would have been running right into the hawk. The bunny
disappeared from view in the tall grass about 3 seconds before the hawk,
talons down and wings back, crashed into the grass.

Pause for dramatic effect...........

After about 5 seconds the hawk bounced back up into the air, hovering over
the grass. My window was open and I could hear its wings beat as it worked
to stay in position and search for the bunny, which was somewhere right in
front of my car. It circled around 3 times, intently searching for the
bunny then banked over the lake and went out of view but only for about a
minute. It returned a second time, flying low obviously searching but the
bunny wasn't to be found and the hawk left and did not return for the
remaining ten minutes I was there. Neither did the bunny. Several hours
later, after the long last day of classes, on a whim I pulled back into the
parking area and there was the bunny. Lesson learned, it was keeping very
close to the blackberries.

Rob Sandelin
Naturalist, Writer, Teacher
Snohomish County