Birdwatching: Red Tailed Hawk

[firstfrost]

On the way home from the T station, this guy was sitting on top of a street sign, holding onto a pigeon which was flapping desparately to get away. He banged it on the sign a couple of times, but that didn't seem to calm it down any. Then he took off with the pigeon to the trees on the other side of the street, but he couldn't get too much altitude (the pigeon wasn't really helping fly) and it got away. I didn't have my camera for any of that, but went home and got it to take some pictures of the hawk in a tree.

Comments

[merastra.livejournal.com]

That's a cool photo!

(And a *very* weird story about the guy and the pigeon. Poor pigeon.)

[eichin.livejournal.com]

According to the MIT-hawk-cam page (a few years back), pigeons are "junkfood" for hawks, very fatty (and since pigeons scavenge, full of other nasty stuff too.) So maybe it's just as well that the pigeon escaped :-)

(btw. just noticed the knitting-works-in-progress sidebar - how do you set that up? or is the knitting community powerful enough that it's a basic livejournal feature now? :-)

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Ravelry (http://ravelry.com) is the One True Place to track knitting projects; it has an API that generates a progress bars page, like so (http://web.mit.edu/boojum/www/pbars.html), but since you can't embed javascript in LJ, I just generate a little picture from that page automatically on login, and that's what gets embedded.

[eichin.livejournal.com]

Oh, hah, didn't even think to check that it was a plain image. Thanks!

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I think it's a young hawk, so teenagers eating junk food is not so suprising. :)

[merastra.livejournal.com]

Oh wait. I just re-parsed this whole thread and realized that the guy who was holding the pigeon was a hawk. Doh.

Hello, Brain? Please to be turning on, yes? ;-)

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Oh! Hee! Yes, "this guy" was meant to be in the tone of voice of pointing at the picture, not the tone of voice of saying "this weird *guy*...". But now I see how it goes the other way too. :)