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September 6, 2008
Death Eating an Onion Sandwich
I walked over to Bud's today and he said I looked like "death eating an onion sandwich". Which I did. I'd just rolled out of bed and wandered over in my sweats and a T-shirt toting a 12 gauge.
As I stood watching the late afternoon's rays fall against the mountains, a bird came diving down, helter skelter out of the sky, with a smaller bird right behind it. It always fascinates me how smaller birds attack larger birds, but this is what was going on, for certain. The larger bird came in low and tight to make a pass over Bud's garden, but didn't see the chickenwire until it was too late.
At the last second, the larger bird turned slightly and nailed one of the green T-bars that supports the chickenwire around the garden. He hit it wide open, dead on, snapping his neck. The large bird collapsed to the ground, dead as a doornail and the little bird flew away as though nothing happened.
I had no idea what kind of bird it was that had crashed into the garden. It's not a bird we had in Mississippi. I would say for certain that it was a bird of prey, and that it definitely wasn't a Red Tailed Hawk, but that was all I could say for certain.
This all happened very quickly, of course. In a fraction of a second all of this happened and, before I could take a step toward the dead bird, it got up and flew away. So, probably it didn't snap its neck and apparently it wasn't dead. But you should have seen how hard it hit that steel pole.
So, I watched it fly away and I had no clue what it was. Just some sort of raptor, but I did notice how pronounced the wings were. Long and thin. Not like a hawk or owl at all. So, when I got home, I found a chart for birds of prey in flight and, after looking at the chart, I'm almost certain it was a Falcon. Either a Prairie Falcon or a very rare Peregrine Falcon.
I actually went back down to the garden later to see if I could find any feathers that it lost in the collision in hopes of identifying it more certainly, but was unsuccessful.
Posted by Rob Kiser on September 6, 2008 at 8:15 PM
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