There is an arboretum near my house. We call it Squirt Park, because that's where we used to walk our dog, and he would leave liquid messages for all the other dogs who came along later.
In Squirt Park, there live a great variety of birds: flickers, woodpeckers, an owl, nearly a dozen crows, several pairs of jays, sparrows, finches, juncos, starlings, umpteen hundred pigeons and doves, and three mated pairs of Cooper's hawks. The hawks are fierce hunters, even fiercer defenders of their nest sites. I found bird remains under a tree in the arboretum and watched an adult hawk feeding half-grown chicks the carcass of a plump dove. Gruesome, but fascinating.
In recent months, I've noticed that some of the hawks come to the flat roof of my carport to eat their prey. There, they also leave the remains. The crows saw these remains as windfalls and would keep the rooftop fairly clean.
However, since the kittens arrived and grew big enough to climb trees -- from which they leap onto the carport roof -- the crows haven't been so tidy. Consequently, the nearly grown kittens are the beneficiaries of the hawks' garbage. They've brought down rabbit bits (mostly fur), squirrel tails, leftover bird pieces, and last week the wings, head and feet of this hen pheasant. I picked up several feathers in the yard that show the teardrop shape of a bird of prey's beak, and bones that have been separated from the body of the pheasant with almost surgical precision. No cat nor crow peels the fur off a rabbit in order to get to the flesh, but a hawk will.
Until I found the body parts, as far as I knew we didn't have pheasant running wild in downtown Hanover. We have several wooded areas and farms just on the outskirts of town, so maybe the hawks have been hunting there. I heard foxes barking about four, maybe five blocks away one evening this spring, and my friend Ann spotted a coyote out at her place, so city-dwelling pheasants aren't beyond the realm of possibility.
There are wild parts of this town I've not suspected existed until now. With all this other wildlife around my neighborhood on a daily basis, what makes me think a pheasant is so unusual? I mean, we used to have bison and wolves in this state not that long ago, for heaven's sake!
What's next...Sasquatch?
Photo of Cooper's hawk (c) Lloyd Spitalnik. Photo of hen pheasant found at http://www.wildaboutkent.com
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