Adding on to Elena's observations at this location, Bev Baker and I had a good time watching an intriguing hawk/prairie dog encounter:
We were leaving the car at the Res. parking lot when we noticed a lovely white Ferruginous float overhead and then morph into a bullet shape for a stoop! Holding our breath, we watched it descend fast and then come to a screeching halt, seated on the ground, facing a crouching prairie dog. The latter had become toad-shaped in terror. It did not move. The hawk "sat" in front of it, thinking hard. The pd continued to not move. In fact, after several minutes passed with this tableau unchanging, we began to wonder if both we and the hawk had mistaken a weird rock for a pd. On it went. Eventually, with a sudden-ness that startled everyone involved, both the hawk and the pd went into blurred action--the former jumped into the air, the latter disappeared down a hole. And that was that. The hawk was young. Perhaps her juvenile mind could not distinguish between pd and rock if it was immobile? And maybe the pd was smarter than we thought-- choosing the classic rabbit strategy to confuse the predator. Our subsequent hike included most of Elena's birds and a harrier, but we missed the Harlan's. Linda Linda Andes-Georges Boulder County (W of Lagerman, N of Haystack, E of Table Mtn) [Jean-Pierre says: W of Paris, S of Quebec, E of Tahiti] 8417 Stirrup Ln Longmont CO 80503 Tel. 720 668 5214 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/cobirds/7E464A87-251C-425D-BCE8-C630AD002725%40comcast.net. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
