For weeks my feeders have been very sparsely populated, and while I suspected a hawk, I certainly did not expect a Red-tailed Hawk to be the guilty predator. I finally caught a glimpse of him cruising over my block being pursued by a murder of squawking crows. Red-tailed Hawks are much more likely to hang out near the highway a half-mile from our house. They like to sit on the tall utility wires and watch for small rodents.
But once the snow became an almost daily occurrence and the daytime temperatures started dropping, the birds didn’t care if a hawk was around or not. They wanted the easy extra energy they can get from feeding from backyard birdfeeders. I went from filling my feeders once every 3 days to filling it twice a day!
