Walking along the road out to the barn yesterday, I came across some flies buzzing around something on the ground. It was a pile of some guts that had been slightly flattened by one of the arboretum vehicles. I looked up to the limb above it and saw feathers scattered across it. As I begin to scan the ground below the limb, I saw a leg that had been torn off or broken off that had a big yellow foot and black claws. A feather was on the ground nearby. It was a new feather that was still growing out, which indicates that this might have been a juvenile bird.
What happened here? I looked at feathers online and the color of the feet of large birds of prey, and my best guess at the moment is that it is a red-tailed hawk. I don’t really imagine these birds being preyed upon, and they probably aren’t very often. I could see more new feathers on the limb, so this was probably a juvenile still in the nest or perched on a limb nearby. I thought about what bird lives in the arboretum and is big enough to kill a red-tailed hawk. I looked up the diet of a great horned owl on The Cornell Lab’s All About Birds: “They eat mostly mammals and birds—especially rabbits, hares, mice, and American Coots, but also many other species including voles, moles, shrews, rats, gophers, chipmunks, squirrels, woodchucks, marmots, prairie dogs, bats, skunks, house cats, porcupines, ducks, loons, mergansers, grebes, rails, owls, hawks, crows, ravens, doves, and starlings. They supplement their diet with reptiles, insects, fish, invertebrates, and sometimes carrion.” This is quite an impressive list, and as you can see, hawks are on the menu. All About Birds also had this to say: “Although they are usually nocturnal hunters, Great Horned Owls sometimes hunt in broad daylight. After spotting their prey from a perch, they pursue it on the wing over woodland edges, meadows, wetlands, open water, or other habitats.” The nighttime hunting hours are pretty short this time of year, so maybe an owl was out this morning.
Whatever did this, it certainly perked up my awareness. It had the power to tear the leg off! Yipes!
