Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Off Topic - birds...

Spent time outside this afternoon filling bird feeders. Buy individual seeds in 40-50 # bags as in the long run cheaper than buying the premixed stuff. Ground corn, white millet, black oil sunflower, saff-flower, thistle seed, toss in some shucked peanuts, mix and feed. Here in North Iowa winter, we see Cardinals, Blue Jays, Downy and red woodpeckers, English and house sparrows, wrens, Gold, House, and Purple Finches, Brown creepers, Nuthatches, Black capped Chickadees, Junco's, and probably a few others I can't think of right now. Blue birds, robins, hummingbirds, Indigo Buntings and a few others come in spring.

Have alot of bald eagles in the area anymore, 30-50 years ago they were a rare occurrence. Have plenty of Hoot owls and other varieties, along with Cooper and RedTailed Hawks. Tree rats!!!--Towns have alot of grey squirrels and reds. Don't see to many greys in country, but the PITA squirrels are the little true tree rats "Jack Squirrels. Real bird feeder thieves. Early spring before leaves 'leaf' and in fall when leaves start falling, my two 12 gauges get a workout using #8 trap loads. They'll overpopulate bad if ya let em, small and move too fast for a 22. Usually get around 20 or so in spring and equal number in fall. I'm in rural countryside, they don't go to waste. My barn cats love em.

I guess we are fortunate. We don't have any trees and therefore no "tree rats". We don't have any ground squirrel varmints thanks to our gigantic stray tomcat watermelon. We call him watermelon due to his markings and that in the Winter he gets so fat he has the shape of a watermelon.

Neighborhood bully has moved in.

Awesome looking hawk!

We have a Sharp Shinned Hawk guarding our bird feeders.

He's got to eat too. Can't hate him for that...

He can have all the sparrows and chickadees that he wants. But leave my goldfinches alone!!!!

My Dad had a pet Red Tailed Hawk that sat on the clothes line every day. It never dove on song birds. Actually, it never dove on anything. Dad hated Blue Jays and would shoot them off the feeder, out of the porch window. As soon as the Jay hit the ground, the Hawk would just plop down on the ground and waddle over and get it. I'm surprised the thing could fly it was so fat.

Here's a couple Thanksgiving dinners out the window of hunting camp. My wife got new bird seed, she wasn't happy with the visitors, I better go change it.

I don't think Redtails whack as many song birds as Cooper or Sharp Shinned Hawks.

Nope. Redtails go for slower, bigger game. The Coopers and Sharp Shinned are small bird chasers.

In some areas Redtails concentrate on "Euopean Rock Doves" (we call 'em pigeons and all sorts of other less printable things....). Redtails are good people.

Is that why one keeps dive bombing me?

No, Joe, it's because of gamey baseball cap you wear!

Rabbits, squirrels, mice and snakes seem to be high on the menu in these parts. Baby groundhogs seem to be a delicacy as well.

I stumbled onto a dead red-tailed hawk in the woods once. When I bent down to pluck a few feathers for fly tying (yeah I know that's illegal) I saw what killed it. It had choked to death on a green garter snake, which was dead too. Interesting scene.

Gary, I saw a hawk with a ginormous snake in it's talon's, for the birds size, on the farm where we shot the postal challenge a few years back. What ever happened to the possum?