We may know what happened to Chica....

December 1, 2009

A couple of days ago my neighbor Fred told me that he had heard there was a falcon or hawk in the neighborhood. It was a little more than three years ago that Fred had come knocking at our front door and said there was hawk on our neighbor's chimney. He told us he waved his arms to scare the hawk to protect Chica, who had been startled, flapped off her perch and into the middle of the street.

Well we think a hawk is back.

Today, after I got some tacos for lunch, Ruth called me to the house next door. She was speaking very softly and said there was a hawk in the tree. I went into the house and grabbed my camera.

Ruth thinks this is a Cooper's Hawk, commonly known as a Chicken Hawk. The bird was not bothered by me sneaking up on it and taking pictures. It would jump around in the tree, from limb to limb, but it did not fly away.

At one point this brazen hawk flew within feet of us. It flew down on the short retaining wall of our neighbor, and then flew up to the power pole and then away.

Karen, the neighbor who's tree the hawk was in, was on her second story porch talking to us about the hawk and mentioned something about all of the feathers in her yard.

We walked around her place and found there were grey feathers everywhere.

We spent quite a bit of time looking around her property looking for something more than just feathers. But this was the extent of our discovery.

It got me thinking.....

I don't know if the two birds are the same bird...OR NOT. But I went back in my archives and found some shots taken three years ago.

Granted this was a Peregrine female because after the falcon tore the meat off of this pigeon she then....

flew up and fed her chicks that were in a nest in the palm tree near the Claremont Ramp.

So after the "New" hawk flew away I rode my bike down to the same area on Claremont, looking for her nest or any Chica evidence. NOTHING.

So maybe we will never know, but for now I think Chica will not be coming back. Meanwhile, Ruth is looking for her Birds of Prey reference book to confirm her identification of the new hawk, since it is definitely not the previously sighted Peregrine Falcon.

These are two photos of the immature "Accipiter Cooperii" from Google. When Ruth was the girlfriend of a falconer (another life, don't ask), she learned that the Cooper's Hawk could be trained to hunt by keeping it hungry and weighing it carefully, to maintain the level of hunger, without starvation---like a diet for the hunting bird of prey. The "accipiter" would get a little crazy, and attack a bird even larger than itself, driven by hunger, sort of like Ruth herself, when she hasn't been fed.

This is a reference photo of the "Falco Peregrinus". You can see the difference in the coloring, the "leggings", and that is is larger than the Cooper's Hawk.

We may never know exactly what happened to Chica, but we enjoyed her company for seventeen years, and we miss the noisy little bitch--bites and all. Even the neighbors, who we sometimes worried were bothered by all her sound effects, have mentioned how the neighborhood is too quiet now, and they miss her calls as well.