The New Hotness

“Our” pair of Cooper’s Hawks (or their descendants, of which there have been many) hatched a pair of chicks that recently fledged and have been exploring their world:

Sometimes they perch together:

Their world contains many interesting things, not all of which are visible to the human eye:

I’ve spotted a parent hawk circling high overhead while the youngsters practice their flight skills near the treetops. If you listen carefully, you can hear a hawk calling from far above:

We’ve seen them hopping from branch to branch, testing their wings, and by now they can launch from a standing start:

New squirrels emerge at about the same time, with equivalent levels of experience:

Right out of the nest, new hawks know what to do, if not quite how to accomplish it:

That little squirrel instantly pasted itself to the bottom of the branch and escaped. This time, anyway.

Mary watched one hawk practicing its pouncing skills by attacking a pine cone. A talon wedged under a tight pine cone scale, to the extent that the hawk spent the next half hour flopping around the yard trying to part company with its personal Pine Tar Baby.

Perhaps the piles of Chipmunk Gibbage came from a new hawk practicing its regurgitation skills …

Go, new hawks, go!

Taken with the Sony DSC-H5, sometimes with the 1.7x teleadapter, under ambient light, hand-held, sometimes braced against the frame of a partially open door.