Life & death in my backyard

It was hot today, like all the rest have been lately. Since I had a lot of programming work to do I decided to spend the day working from my home office. Everything was nice and quiet until about 2:00 when I began to hear a lot of commotion outside. Several birds were making a lot of racket. Sometimes thats not all that unusual since there are several nests around and there are the occasional territorial disputes. Just yesterday I was out taking pictures of a baby robin who was learning to fly. He would fly from one side of the yard to the other and

wait there while his mother would bring him a worm or a bug of some sort. After a long rest, he would try again and land somewhere and wait for Mom to show up.

Several minutes went by and it was obvious that one of the birds was really really upset. I grabbed my camera and walked out the back door to see what was going on. I could see a mocking bird and a robin flapping around and chirping very excitedly. But their attention was not directed at each other, it was directed at a large hawk.

The hawk had obviously taken a baby or maybe the partner of one of the other birds. They watched and chirped, completely powerless to do anything about it. I wondered if it was the baby I was photographing the day before.

This was the only picture I was able to get. I'm not a bird expert but I believe this is a young (maybe 2 year) red-tailed hawk. We see a lot of them but I have never seen one in my yard before. I tried walking around more to the front of him to get a better shot without the leaves in the way but he took his catch and flew off. You can see from the picture if you look close that he is holding the fence with one claw and his catch with the other. He was a very beautiful bird to watch and although I felt bad for his prey, that's just life.

This second picture is a small hummingbird in one of my trees. You can see he's about as long as a leaf and the leaves on this tree are only about 2.5 - 3" long. I think he would barely make a snack for a large hawk.