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I’ve seen young Red-tailed Hawk s who just don’t have the hang of it, counting on luck of good fortune to present them with a careless gopher or a rare easy meal. On this occasion Patch had secured a gopher and was dining on a streetlight. Patch was focused and deliberate, consistent and inventive. She had remembered.
Here Patch sits on a bench watching a pocket gopher tidy up the front of its burrow. Here she is carrying a squirming gopher over the heads of park-goers who actually notice the spectacle. She understood the threat of large ravens, and yet would fly three feet off the ground through intersections. Another strange encounter.
They know the rhythms of gophers. They share our world without too much complaint, adapting to our cities and towns when they can. They mimic our styles of dress and mock us through forced perspective. They are good watchers. They know the rhythms of traffic. Males can get into a dance battle if territories are threatened.
An intimate moment at dusk between a Red-tailed Hawk and an expired gopher. Baby Red-shouldered Hawk puts on its game face after falling from the nest. Northern Harrier bristling rictally. Black-headed Grosbeak unkempt in the rain. Sharp-shinned Hawk slowly getting blood-red angry. It takes them 4-5 years to become furious. Wild Turkey.
Gophers that live near streetlights beware. Next time you find the light fading and resign yourself to a night sky filled with owls and bats, remember that some diurnal denizens like to stay out late too. Red-tailed Hawks have a habit of hunting well into the night if there is any available light and the getting is good.
The hawk was intent on finding gophers and I used its focus to my advantage and closed the distance gradually. It was actively hunting the grassy slopes and barely paid me any attention as I tried to figure out how to get as close as possible without changing its behavior.
No “gophers” etc. I can’t think of many sights more entertaining than a red fox scouting a meadow in search of mice – or gophers, voles, gerbils – well, mice in a German sense. In German, if you are a rodent and you are smaller than – say – a human hand, you’re a mouse.
I imagine this is the last thing many gophers in Klamath see. She turned and headed right for me with a few powerful flaps of her wings, screaming the whole way. Message received, at this point I was backing towards and into my open car door as she drove the point home.
In addition to these aerial predators, their eggs and young are often taken by squirrels, gray foxes, house cats, coyotes, gopher snakes, rattlesnakes, raccoons, American Crows and Western Scrub-Jays. Let us also not forget the two-legged predator with a shotgun.
In Half Moon Bay there is a park that provides… gophers, voles, snakes, whatever suits your crop. But they are nothing if not adaptable. As birds adjust to urban environments they figure out what the real concerns are and play by a new set of rules. It also provides ocean views and trails and draws many people too.
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