Injured hawk saved from an illegal trap
Every day, police officers respond to reports of all sorts of events and nonevents, most of which never make the news. Here is a sampling of lesserknown — but no less noteworthy — incidents from police log books (a.k.a. blotters) in our suburbs.
INJURED HAWK RESCUED
On Sept. 27, Norfolk Animal Control Officer Hilary Cohen shared a tale of a call she received just before her shift was over for the day. Her help was needed to capture a hawk that was injured at a business off Route 1 in Foxborough. Cohen grabbed her equipment and when she arrived at the scene, she found some employees keeping an eye on the hawk from a distance. They told her he couldn’t fly because he was caught in a leg-hold trap. After several tries, Cohen managed to net the hawk on the far side of a river and carry him back to her truck. After securing the bird in a cage, she handed him over to the Foxborough animal control officer, who brought him to Tufts Wildlife Clinic in Grafton for treatment. “Folks, leg hold traps are not only illegal, they are deadly dangerous,” Cohen wrote on Facebook. “Animals suffer and perish attached to these snap closures. This guy has a 2 foot chain dragging off the trap that could have easily been caught up on branches. Imagine if this was a human foot or hand stuck in this? I come across a call every few years for leg hold traps and it is horrifying to see them in action. Please, if you see a leg hold trap anywhere call an ACO, police, Environmental Police, etc. They should NOT be set anywhere as they are an inhumane device. Thankfully this hawk had great people trying to help and he’ll get great help from Tufts Wildlife.”
WHO’LL BE SORRY?
At 7:32 p.m. on Sept. 21, Watertown police received a report that four packages were delivered to a local home.
When the resident checked, he saw the name on the package was “Yul Be Sorry.” The packages arrived at 3 p.m. that day and they contained rapid COVID-19 testing kits. Police notified the US Postal Service about the incident and gave them the tracking numbers for the packages. Was it a prank? Or some kind of scam? We asked USPS spokesman Steve Doherty about it, and he said because the sender wasn’t asking for money or anything, it may have been a prank or some kind of “inside joke.”
DISTURBANCE AT THE DOG PARK
At 9:20 a.m. on Oct. 13, Hingham police received a 911 call about a disturbance unfolding at Stodder’s Neck state park. The caller told police that someone “threw a dog toy” and tried to hit him in the face. Police then received a call from another person at the park who said a man “tried to swing his fist at him to punch him” and he responded by throwing a “soft squishy toy at him.” And the cause for this (alleged) ruckus? According to the log entry, it was an “argument over a parking space.”
SPIDER SIGHTING
At 12:12 p.m. on Oct. 7, Hingham police answered a rather unusual call from the bathing beach on Otis Street. A woman had called police to alert them that there was a jumping spider near the beach, and wanted someone to take a look at it. According to the log entry, she was concerned because she had been bitten by a spider a month before and had become sick. She said another woman also was sitting nearby and saw a jumping spider, and she killed it. The animal control officer responded, checked all the bushes in that location, and couldn’t find any spiders.
Emily Sweeney can be reached at emily.sweeney@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @emilysweeney and on Instagram @emilysweeney22.