Hawk sets up Housekeeping in the Barn

Yesterday  I stalked the hawk who had moved into the barn for a few days hunting. Taking photographs of suspicious flying raptors is a very different concept from taking a photo of a cow as she stands and leans and stares. However, even without the right lens or light,  I amused myself for a while. Bob from Texas Tweeties (my blog resident  bird watcher, who is well worth watching himself, if you like birds, which I do)  has told me that he (or she) is either a Coopers Hawk or the smaller Sharp Shinned Hawk. They are almost exactly alike though the Sharp Shinned Hawk  (try and say that eight times in a hurry) is a bit smaller. 

All the cats were thrilled to be hauled back to the house and locked inside. They were literally and I mean literally climbing the walls in the barn to hunt the new guy, everyone was in a high state of agitation and someone would have lost an eye!  These guys are lethal hunters and need to eat every day.  There would have been tears before bed time. 

I sat in the barn with my camera propped on my knees for ages, until my arms ached  (like a real bird watcher) and soon he began to fly to and fro.

There is very little light up that high in the barn.  I am sitting on a kind of cat walk very high up in the eaves. 

We had opened the big doors in the hope that he would fly out so we could get on with mucking out. He got quite frantic when we started to work  in the barn yesterday so  we had to abandon the floors until he vacates the premises.

He seemed disinclined to oblige.  He has the sweetest little call too. He would fly quite close and sit and watch me (wondering if I were food) then cheep.  More of a bop actually.  Such a tiny sound for so formidable a bird.   

So I just kept practising my wildlife photographs.  You can see that I am sitting about 60 feet from this window. Lamenting the loss of my old zoom lens. 

They fly very fast, you cannot track this bird. I have many shots of empty space. 

The shot below is from earlier in the day when the sun was shining straight into the barn and even blurred with speed he is a magnificent bird. 

As a special thank you for the accomodation he decided not to kill any of my chickens, and the guineas lay low all day after screaming their heads off (wah, wah, plonk) half the morning. The barn was completely empty of pigeons all day too, though there was evidence of night time snacking! By evening it was quiet. So without fanfare he must have swooped low, seen the big open doors and silently moved on.

And so it dawns again – a Sunday morning. The weather man writes that there will be lots of sunshine today, which is good as the little plants in their little paper seed catalogue pots are once again lined up at the door awaiting their rides to the outside.   I ran out of newspaper the other day and made plant pots from the pages of actual seed catalogues.  The irony does not escape me!

Good morning.

celi