The Day My Birds Went Quiet

Usually our backyard is full of small birds. The melody of the chickadees and the chirps of the sparrows is always constant and pretty loud from sun up to sun down. Today started the same as always. The sparrows show up first and fill up the Golden Willow beside my deck. They chirp at each other, eat food from the feeders, and bathe in the dog's heated water bowl. All was normal and I was going about my morning, finishing up my coffee, checking out Steemit, and I noticed it was eerily quiet.. I don't really know how long it was before I noticed that all action had stopped but when I looked out to see what was up.... There she was.

I wasn't expecting to see a beautiful female in my back yard when I walked toward the door. She was very well kept, was a good size, had memorizing eyes, long nails, but looked like she was on a mission for something. Her mission was scaring away all my birds!! I thought that was the mission at first, but later her intents became known to me. She was the only thing in the yard that was out of the normal. I knew I had to do something. I grabbed my camera and started snapping pictures of her. I wanted to make sure I could identify who she was. I got some great pictures showing tons of unique detail. I knew I now had enough information to move forward with the identification.

Here is a picture of the suspect and now I know exactly who she is!!

She is a female Sharp Shinned Hawk!!

Here is my body of evidence proving she is the culprit who was scaring my birds.

Even the feet are a dead give away.

So I took my photographic evidence back to the counter and grabbed my Birds of Canada Book.

I had her Identity nailed down.

When I finished referencing my bird tome I returned to the door and peered out only to see she had left. I felt as though the birds had nothing to fear anymore and should come out from under the deck, where they were sheltering in place, and resume their normal routine. My thought was confirmed and the birds emerged from the deck and retook their perch in the Golden Willow. This was when the female intruder made her intents known to us all.

Swooping down from on top of the house, she silently snatched a small sparrow from the near branch of the willow. In a split second she fulfilled her mission and left stealthily with her reward. The rest of the birds scattered and hid under the deck again. All day they have been under the deck. It is eerily quiet, barely a chirp, and every now and again a brave soul ventures out to the feeder and grabs some food and scurries back to under the deck. I hope things return to normal again because it truly is a sad state for my birds to live in. It is nature and like the saying goes "it will run its course".

I guess I learned a learned a lesson today... The moral of the story is, When you put out a bird feeder and feed the birds, you might get results from more than one level of the food chain....

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All photos are original and shot with my Nikon P900