This Red-tailed Hawk in Green-Wood picked up a songbird and took into a pine to pluck. The prey was tiny, possibly a kinglet, hardly seemed worth the effort, and yet…
In the top picture, you can see some feathers blowing off to the right. A clump came down to me.
Same area, earlier. There were two, sometimes three RTs overhead at one point.
These big Buteos are not renown as bird-hunters, but they can mix songbirds as well as pigeons in with their more typical mammalian prey. Flexibility in diet must be one key to their adaptability to human environments.
I’ve wondered about the cost/benefit ratio of hunting prey. Is there enuf caloric gain from the tiny bird to offset the caloric burn in catching it?
Good question. I witnessed another incident in the same general area more recently (there will be pictures eventually), this time what looked like a thrush was taken on the ground before the hawk carried it to a tree to eat, all in about three minutes. It could be a question of opportunism. There were tons of birds around this fall in Green-Wood Cemetery, a very rich migration season, but most have cleared out by now (I’m typing during our first snowfall). Back to mammals? These hunting forays take effort, and most are misses. Red-tails seem to go after whatever is available.