There's a Killer on the Rampage

In my back yard.

He's not afraid of me, or DH. Sometimes he does his killing right in front of me, 3 or 4 times a year. He's blazingly fast, but sometimes not accurate, and once he went for a kill, over-shot his target and bonked into the side of my house, where he had to sit on the ground for a some minutes to collect his wits, while DH and I looked at him/her very closely and made sure he was okay.

I saw him hanging around the backyard on Friday...looking for lunch.

Saturday morning I was looking out my back window at the crowded bird feeder and I thought...wouldn't it be neat if that little hawk came in right now. No sooner had I said the sentence in my head than the little hawk came streaking into the bird feeder, talons extended. The sparrows scattered, and the Sharp Shinned hawk took off in hot pursuit of one of them.

I came home from school one Friday afternoon last fall, and there, sitting on the neighbor's fence 5 feet from my passenger window, was the hawk. I watched him for a good 10 minutes..and of course, I did not have my camera in the car, like I usually do.

Anyway, here's my back yard killer, photo by Bill Thompson III.