The Cooper’s Hawk and the Rat

Drama in my backyard.

 

Two days ago in the evening I was sitting at my patio table when I saw a Cooper’s Hawk fly in and land near the top of my largest catalpa tree. At the time I assumed it was my old friend Hannibal, the juvenile Cooper’s Hawk that pays an almost daily visit to my yard to hunt songbirds at my feeders.

The hawk was in the densest part of the tree, up high, where I couldn’t see it, but it could see…

 

 

my feeders (behind me) and the thick grape vine directly behind them, where birds often hide from any marauding hawks.

My friend and neighbor Shane was in his backyard too, so I texted him, telling him about the hawk in my tree (Shane is a bird photographer too).

Notice the notch or low spot at the top of the vine to the left. Normally Shane and I can only see the tops of each other’s heads when we try to talk to each other through the vine, so we trim that spot lower which enables us to see more of each other’s heads. We call that spot in the vine a “Wilson Window”, in honor of Tim and Wilson from the 90’s TV show Home Improvement (Shane is Tim and I’m Wilson).

After texting Shane I went back to watching my feeders in anticipation of an attack from the hawk in my tree. The attack occurred but the hawk wasn’t Hannibal and it wasn’t after a songbird.

 

 

Suddenly I noticed a rat in my grape vine and it was trying to jump from the vine to my feeders. Occasionally I see a rat beneath my feeders, scrounging bird seed that has fallen to the ground, but this was the first time I’d ever seen one in my vine. This guy was nearly 4′ off the ground.

First ‘he’ tried to figure out a way to jump to this feeder. When that didn’t work he…

 

 

tried the other feeder. That didn’t work either – the vines were to “springy” to allow him to push off. They barely supported his weight.

 

 

So next he tried to jump to the pole supporting the feeders. That also didn’t work.

 

 

This is the last look I had of him before the hawk swooped down from the tree and made its attack.

The rat saw the hawk coming and disappeared in the vine. The hawk swooped over the vine and landed on it right next to Wilson’s Window, on Shane’s side of the vine where I couldn’t see it (Shane told me where it was).

At that point I figured I’d seen the last of the hawk, but I was wrong. That persistent bird wasn’t ready to give up on the rat so it came back to my side of the grape vine and…

 

 

landed very close to me on the top railing of my old deck, where it could scan the entire length of the vine for the rat or anything else that looked appetizing.

As I said before, this is not Hannibal. Hannibal is a juvenile but this bird is transitioning into adult plumage. Based on size I suspect this Coop is a female.

When she couldn’t spot the rat from this vantage point she…

 

 

flew down to my bird bath for a drink. Notice that her bill is wet.

 

 

From here she flew almost straight up a few feet to…

 

 

the top of my feeder pole. She kept looking for that rat in the vine. When she couldn’t see it from this side of the vine she…

 

 

flew back to Shane’s side.

This shot isn’t very sharp but it gives us a good look at the differences between her remaining juvenile plumage (brown feathers) and her new adult plumage (grayish-black feathers).

 

 

The last I saw of her she was still looking for the rat from an old stump in Shane’s yard. The out-of-focus greenery at bottom is the top of the grape vine.

But Rattus disappearus made his getaway safely. Time to dig out one of my rat traps.

Ron

 

Note: Cooper’s Hawks are best known for eating songbirds but they’ll kill and eat rodents, including rats, when the opportunity arises.