It was supposed to be showery and cloudy today, but at
midmorning there was a teaser of sun. We
quickly gather our cameras and my sketchbook and head out to grab a few
minutes of sunshine. Morning is great –
thousands of starlings and about 200 crows shift back and forth between a
yellowing vineyard and a bucolic pasture. I spend an hour savoring the
dampness, the constant chatter of crows, and constant calling from the flocks
of starlings as they swoop and swirl back and forth.
Dark, rain-filled clouds sweep in during early afternoon,
but the rain is holding off. We decide
to stay out a little longer, to check a little pond that might have some
hooded mergansers.
As we come over the rise and get our first look at the pond
I realize we just missed Act One.
The curtain is rising on Act Two.
Blackberry bushes are shaking on the far side of the pond. Seventeen hooded mergansers have swum over to
the commotion. A great blue heron flies
in too, takes a good look, and quickly flies off, squawking as he goes. The mergansers just don’t know what to make
of the spectacle. All have their crests
well fluffed, even the hens. A few of
the drakes even rear up in typical courtship behavior. They are as excited as we are.
The bush continues shaking.
Finally we get a clue. A wing
pops out of the green leaves and quickly disappears into the shrubbery
again. A hawk is caught in the blackberries! Ouch! We finally see him. He pulls and tugs, one leg stretched out
behind.
He isn’t caught! He has done the catching. The hawk holds a fairly large prey item, and is
now trying to untangle it from the blackberry bush. It is an awkward
tussle.
Success at last. The
hawk breaks free from the blackberries and gathers himself together into a semi
dignified pose. He has something clutched in his foot. For now he just wants to rest on the steep
slope. Now that the excitement is over, the mergansers drift off and start fishing
for their own dinner. The males are such
‘Dapper Dans’. The hens are just as
beautiful, but in a quiet way. Over on
the far side of the pond the great blue heron fishes too.
I’m trying to figure out what kind of hawk and what did he
catch. First impression is that it is an
immature red-tailed hawk. It is just a
little far away to tell for sure. The
prey us mostly hidden but has some orangey-yellow and is quite large.
It’s a huge bullfrog!
It is the grand daddy of all bull frogs.
We’ve seen redtails splash into shallow water before to catch frogs …
and salamanders. No wonder the hawk looks wet. Is the frog too big to fly with?
Act three
The hawk doesn’t seem in any hurry to go anywhere and we’ve
got plenty to watch while we wait. The
merganser swim together, feeding along the far shore line. They tend to all dive at once, each one
rolling into the water with a little splash.
Then, one by one, they pop up like inflated balloons. Usually at least one is just finishing
gulping down something – a minnow? A dragonfly larvae? I can’t tell.
Meanwhile the heron is getting nearer to us. He pauses and looks around. Head high and neck long, he slowly
wades.
Something catches the heron’s attention. His body eases forward; his neck lowers and
settles into an S curve, coiled, ready to stab.
Out darts his neck. Bam! Splash!
Into the pond goes his head. A
quick flick and he swallows another little fish.
After a good half hour the hawk is finally feeding, pulling
and tugging on the bullfrog. It is a
slow process. We stay and watch for
another 45 minutes. It gets dark early at
this time of year. Finally the hawk
lifts off and disappears into the nearby Douglas firs. I can't see if he carried any remains of
frog.
Postscript:
After we got home and could look at our photographs on the
computer, Dale realized the hawk is an immature red-shoulder hawk, not at
red-tailed hawk. They are much
smaller. The frog still looks big near
the red-shouldered hawk, but perhaps not the grand daddy of all bullfrogs.
