Posted by Jim Duquesnel on July 02, 2002 at 21:05:47:
A raptor being harassed by a songbird... if you're an experienced birder, you've seen it often enough that you probably no longer drop whatever your are doing (especially not the steering wheel) to watch.
Well, this time was different. This afternoon (7/2/02), I glimpsed a big raptor being harassed... by a Nighthawk! Now this was something I really never had seen before. Seeing a duck chasing a falcon would have been only a little less surprising.
I pulled over the to the shoulder of C-905, right next to Crocodile Lake in north Key Largo, to see if Nighthawks were any good at this. I had my 8 x 44s handy, low mangrove trees made for a good vista, plus a pick-up bed and eventually the tool box to stand on. All that was missing was a lawn chair, hot pretzel and a cold beer.
Well, after being stooped on a few times, the raptor finally got the idea he wasn't welcome and gave up his low circles to move off into the wind, smack into the home turf of several nesting Redwing Blackbirds. Talk about bad luck. His twists and turns were good, but in vain, there were just too many of them. And the Nighthawk followed along, keeping up his "peent" call throughout the melee.
Changing tactics and putting altitude between him and the pursuit, the big hawk tried going up, losing all but two persistent Redwings and the Nighthawk who, at this point, either couldn't keep up or was perhaps just happy to hang back and watch.
Up to two hundred feet, then maybe three hundred feet, the Redwings persisted and still occasionally got high enough above the hawk to make a couple of dives at his head and back. Finally having enough of that, the big feller poured it on, a power dive that might have made a Peregrine take notice.
Unfortunately, the dive ran out of gas and altitude in the worst of all possible neighborhoods, smack in the middle of a Gray Kingbird family. The hawk did a 180, high-tailing it back into and through the still pursuing Redwings, twisting and turning for all he was worth. Swarmed by posse of six irate Kingbirds, with at least one Tyrant that appeared to be actually landing on his back, and with more redwings rising from the mangroves in answer to the call to battle, I actually felt pretty sorry for this hawk.
Finally out of Kingbird city, he landed on a mangrove snag to hold a staring match with one last kingbird. They sat just six feet apart, with the last Kingbird actually taking an occasional insect between half-hearted passes at the indignant hawk's head, and just daring him to ever try taking wing again. Ten minutes into the episode, and now a stand-off with no signs of further action, I thought it time to pack up.
So... what about the trouble with "profiling?"
The hawk was an Osprey.