A recent question about metro roadside Red-tailed Hawks re-surfaced yesterday. I've thought their prevalence was due to the number of available rodents in the right-of-way off the shoulder of the highway, and I HAVE seen them actually hunt there on a few occasions---but relatively speaking, only a few times. Yesterday, and on other occasions, a hawk was actually perched on lamps in the MEDIAN, if not right on the edge of the blacktop. Since they're not carrion-eaters, are they sometimes simply looking for a more extensive view of possible prey? or making themselves more visible for territorial rights?
In the case of a Great-gray Owl seen in Sax-Zim Bog Saturday, I do think available prey was the answer, With all the less trafficked habitat at its disposal, this no-doubt, savvy resident chose to be quite close to the rather busy main road into Meadowlands, at least twice in the same day. We had been scanning the edges of the many clearings along the road, knowing they had possibilities. The broken snags at the roadside were the key. The owl was on the edge of a huge clearing in the conifers, with plenty of more distant edge-space from which to hunt; yet there it was, close to the highway, perched up on a snag, hidden by camouflage. Finding ourselves right abreast of it, and realizing it was time for its supper-hunt we pulled over, killed the engine, and went silent, with no intention of leaving the car. Sure enough it glanced away from us and began scanning the ground around its perch. After one suspenseful moment it lifted off and dropped down close to the ground for a better listen, but circled back up to the snag empty-taloned. It rousted, preened a bit, then commenced listening again. It re-located to other perches parallel to the roadside, repeating the hunting process a few times (we couldn't see if it was successful), and heading toward the next clearing down the road. The snags were certainly convenient scanning and launching posts, but there were other such snags around the clearing. Why choose the ones by the busy paved roadside? So, it seems as though the road acts like the back of a cul-de-sac that bunches the prey up in a convenient way. or maybe roadsides grow the kind of food more attractive to the rodents the owls hunt. That raises the question of how the owls adapt to different kinds of roads, gravel roads with lower profile/ess traffic, logging roads left to grow over, etc. Whatever the answers, we know birds like this still need large chunks of undisturbed territory for breeding, and we need to protect the boreal bogs and tread lightly. Linda Whyte ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
