Hawks fly high at the top of the food chain
I was absentmindedly gazing out the living room window when a red-tailed hawk, half the size of a bald eagle, plunged from the air with talons thrust out like arrowheads to attack a critter on the golf course by my house.
The hapless critter writhed under the grip of the hawk then broke loose from the talons and raced to the base of a nearby pine tree. The massive hawk flapped its wings, leaped up and again pounced on the animal, stabbing at it with a razor-sharp beak shaped like a curved dagger.
I grabbed my binoculars but couldn’t determine what animal the hawk had attacked. Normally, a red-tailed hawk quickly carries its quarry to a perch for consumption. But this hawk was fighting just to get hold of its prey.
Feathers nor fur fluffed off the struggling victim. Must be a reptile, I thought.
Sure enough, the hawk flew off with a snake dangling in its talons. Probably a water moccasin from a golf course pond.
Most people would cheer the hawk for killing a snake. They would also likely cheer the killing of a rat or feel mildly sorry for a squirrel falling prey to a hawk.
We curse the hawk for picking off a bird, yet think nothing of eating wild quail or dove that a person has killed, skinned and neatly packaged for our dinner.
Like the hawk, we are apex predators, meaning we’re at the top of the food chain feasting on other animals while we have no natural predators feasting on us. (Except, I’ve been in East Africa where predators like hyenas and leopards would have happily feasted on me.) Everybody’s gotta eat. Meanwhile, think about multitudes of rats eating their way through our neighborhoods were it not for the hawk.
Red-tailed hawks prefer rats, snakes, rabbits and squirrels over songbirds, which are hunted by smaller and stealthier Cooper’s and sharp-shined hawks. None is a glutton; each eats only enough for sustenance.
A small population of red-tailed hawks resides in greater Houston year-round. Come autumn, their population will boom as their fellows from northern regions migrate here for the winter.
Astonishingly, migratory red-tailed hawks head to the exact locations where they spent last winter and successive winters before that.
They’re big hawks, easy to recognize by their characteristic red tail and broad 4-foot wingspan. But the surefire identification mark is the ever-present dark bar on each wing’s patagium, the leading edge of the wing nearest the body.