[Birdtalk] A Sign of Thriving Cooper's Hawks

[Kristin Purdy]

Prepare for pontificating and postulating, with nary a live bird report in sight.

I saw a sign yesterday that the Cooper's Hawks that nest in my neighborhood are alive and well--a pile of California Quail feathers on the lawn. Finding feather rings on the grass is not unusual for people who feed birds, of course; our yards attract a concentration of birds and become prime hunting grounds for the hunters. What was unusual is that seeing those scattered feathers caused me to think about the Cooper's Hawk in light of Brenda Kidman's reference to a recent letter to the editor of Ogden's Standard-Examiner newspaper. The letter advocated removing protections from magpies because they are killers. You can find the letter here:

http://www.standard.net/live/opinion/letterstotheeditor/102396

I poked through the pile of quail feathers on my lawn as I usually do, as if I were enacting an episode of Avian CSI: Ogden. The point of the investigation is always to determine the victim's species, sex, circumstances of death and ultimately, the perpetrator. That the feather pile was the remains of a quail was easy. But it took awhile to determine that the bird was a female (I found a portion of her topknot and did not find certain male feathers, such as the burgundy belly feathers) and then some reflection to conclude that the quail had likely been killed by a Cooper's Hawk. 

The feather pile was in a relatively open area and feathers were scattered in a three-foot circle. I expect a neighborhood cat would take its kill to a more protected area and to pull off feathers in great tufts and clumps, if at all. These feathers were scattered individually and in an occasional small clump. The openness of the site implied the killer plucked and consumed the quail where the bird was killed--another assumption in favor of the Cooper's, or at least, an accipiter. The quail is a relatively large prey item for a Cooper's Hawk, especially for the smaller male. At this time in the hawk's nesting cycle, the male is likely doing all the hunting for both parents as the female incubates. He takes kills back to the nest territory and exchanges them with the female at a place away from the nest. It's likely that the smaller male hawk wouldn't be able to carry a whole quail back to the nest, which I believe is about three-quarters of a mile from my home. I ruled other less likely predators due to the size of the prey, plucking or nature of the site. 

Another find in the pile of feathers was likely the contents of the quail's crop--some small green leaf segments and a sunflower kernal stuck together. Of course, the kernal told me that the bird was indeed one of my feeder birds and that I had drawn it to my yard for her last meal. It's sometimes difficult not to regret the deaths of birds that occur in my yard, especially those that I attracted here. But I believe the late Eirik Blom, prolific contributing editor to BirdWatcher's Digest, had the right philosophy. We may not relish the idea of attracting the gentle feeder birds to our yards only to be killed by marauding hawks. But the hawks need our help a lot more than do the feeder birds. The Cooper's Hawk, once known as the chicken hawk due to a favored prey item, suffered such persecution by early American settlers that the species has taken years to recover. In addition, I compare the opportunities to see a hawk with the opportunities to see a feeder bird, and I then I welcome the natural predators to my yard. 

As for the quail, I celebrate the four to six pairs that make their morning and evening constitutionals to my feeders each day. I watch for them, I study them, I laugh when they scurry across open areas with head plumes bobbing comically. One male is now missing his mate, but it's unlikely that there are four to six pairs of Cooper's Hawks nesting in my neighborhood. That one pair of Cooper's Hawks needed that female quail. 

Welcoming the killers brings me back to the letter to the editor that advocated removing magpies from the protected list. The killers belong here. The history of American settlement is rife with examples where man tried to eradicate predators, only to find that the ecosystem became unbalanced and the negative effects were far worse than having a healthy predator population. Aldo Leopold had it right, of course: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." I think ol' Aldo would have advocated leaving the magpies alone while also advocating we insure the lids to our garbage cans are closed on garbage day so as not to attract magpies to unnatural food sources.

A rebuttal to the first letter to the editor appeared a few days later. This view makes sense to me:

http://www.standard.net/live/opinion/letterstotheeditor/102696

Kris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://secureserver.securesites.net/pipermail/birdtalk/attachments/20070426/8fca4260/attachment.htm