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Why the pigeons are gone from Tremont Street
By adamg on Fri, 11/14/2008 - 9:05am
Dan Miller noticed something amiss as soon as he left Park Street station: There wasn't a pigeon in sight. Then he saw something out of the corner of his eye:
... It's a huge gray hawk, its wing span at least three feet. Maybe more.
The hawk settles on the street lamp, looking down at the Tremont Street traffic and the passersby, including me. ...
Miller also explains why it's a good thing he shifted course and didn't walk right under the bird.
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Comments
That is true, never walk
That is true, never walk under a bird lol.
I have a hawk near where I live, he is one of three that recently moved to my part of town (who knows where the hell they came from) and they each seemed to have taken up a perch within a mile of each other (forming a triangle, although there may be more that I dont know about) and since they moved in there has been a very small number of pigeons and other rat type birds. Amazingly enough they seem to spare the sparrows, maybe they dont offer a good meal? Its like the bermuda traingle for pigeons, they may come in but they dont make it back out. I wonder about the seagulls that congregate in a local parking lot, maybe they are too big for the hawks? Maybe the hawks havent checked out that area yet...
Seagulls fight back
Pigeons are much easier targets.
Hawks also know not to mess with crows, which gang up on them and chase them out of the 'hood.
Sparrows gang up on hawks
It is quite a spectacle when they do it, too - this huge whooshing dark cloud of little birds and a hawk trying to avoid aerial attack from all sides by the assembled squadron of tiny, noisy harriers.
So, yes, hawks do prey on sparrows, but there are a lot of sparrows and they can get nasty.
For truly vicious hawk bombardments, however, blue jays wear the crown.
Correction
For truly vicious
hawkbombardments, however, blue jays wear the crown.Fixed that for you. My mom almost gave up bird feeding one time when a blue jay took offense to her presence even though she was restocking her feeders at the time.
My cat agrees with you there
Correction accepted.
Blue jays raise one brood, and that first brood sticks around and helps raise the second brood. By late July, any cat opportunist who collects one bonus unlucky baby bird fallen from the nest becomes PUBLIC ENEMY #1 BABY KILLER for the next two weeks. We went through a couple of weeks of calling our big guy, and waiting for him to carefully skulk to the door while walking under anything that he could find for cover, trailing enraged bombers in his wake.
The funniest parts: the time he walked from behind the shed across the patio to the door with a garbage can lid on his back; shooing two blue jays out the door when they pursued him inside the house.
This isn't limited to MA blue jays either. Growing up in Oregon, the same thing happened to my cat with a different species of blue jay. Never mind that the only bird that cat could ever catch was the victim of a fatal mishap - they would even follow him under a car!
Hummingbirds can be stinkers, too.
One summer, one of the birds got it into his little pea-head to begin harassing the family cat. This cat was an accomplished hunter, weighing in at a good 15 pounds of solid feline. The cat was lazing in the grass, soaking up the late afternoon sunshine but this hummer decided he was too close to the feeders. The poor cat put up with being strafed over and over, and finally did something about it. I never witnessed the incident; we returned home from church to find the cat in the same spot but with a smattering of green and red feathers all over the grass around him. That was that.
As for the sudden dearth of pigeons on Tremont I say good riddance. Too bad the gulls can't be gotten rid of in a similar way. Whose bright idea was to make them a protected species?????
This is great then, Im not
This is great then, Im not seeing any down side to these guys hanging out around here. Is there something Im missing? They come in and eat the pigeons but for the most part spare the sparrows. WIN WIN! There mus be something that they are doing thats hurting something I care about tho.
I came face-to-face with
I came face-to-face with this same hawk last year while we were hanging out in the playground in the Commons. I was watching a squirrel over by the fence, when all at once there was this immense "Swoosh" and a flurry of action as the hawk dove on the squirrel and the squirrel made a quick and successful retreat into a tree. The hawk stood on the ground not more than six feet from me for a good thirty seconds, looking as if to say "I meant to do that", then slowly flew off only a few feet off the ground.