The Urban Pantheist

We spent some time trying to "find" Fort Myers. Gertrude Stein may have lamented that "there's no there there" about her home town of Oakland, but I've heard it more accurately applied to other places. We tried in vain to find a town center, walkable village, or cohesive sense of Fort Myers that we could understand as New Englanders. One time I set the GPS for Centennial Park, in "downtown" Fort Myers. There were tall buildings and a park, but we didn't stay long. This laughing gull gave us a funny look as we looked across to the hotels of North Fort Myers where spent the night.

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I was positive when I encountered this bird, perched above my car, conspicuously near my neighbor's birdfeeders, that I was seeing my first definite sharp-shinned hawk Accipiter striatus. I've seen plenty of Cooper's hawks Accipiter cooperii, a slightly larger dead ringer for the sharp-shinned. Females of both species are much larger than males, so male Coops and female sharpies actually come pretty close to the same size. The bird pictured here is just an inch or so longer than a blue jay. I still think it's a sharpie, but when you're talking with bird people you'd better have a DNA sample handy if you want to avoid a controversy

Your regularly scheduled Monday Urbpan Picspam may be worse than normal today. Our internet went out on Friday, and has been spotty all weekend. We're getting new (legit) service installed today, and that makes me happy. In the meanwhile, wifi is drifting through the wall (yay, living on a city block!) for a while at least, so I can start with the pics.



Saturday was sunny, and the temperature was way way up--in the 50's! The metrowest stroller brigade was out in full force, and families with kids of all ages and even some adults without children were milling about the place. Here one of our Teachers, Pete, is doing a snake demo.( Read more... )

Broad-winged hawk.
(I took this picture to document the strange middle talon on its left foot, but I like the photograph enough to share, too.)

Photos by cottonmanifesto

Urban Species #045: Red-tailed hawk Buteo jamaicensis

The red-tailed hawk has earned its place as the contemporary living emblem of urban nature. It seems to thrive in the city, uninvited, unencouraged, and seemingly incongruous with the man-made landscape. There are few real predators living in the midst of the glass and steel towers.

One of the first actions taken by humans when they claim land is to purge it of predatory animals. So it was with hawks: shot on sight when they were thought to menace the farmer's chickens, most species see a calamitous drop in population when human settlements spread. In the United States during the twentieth century, a series of laws was enacted to protect birds of prey. Their numbers have slowly increased over the past few decades, and today a hawk is not an uncommon sight, in almost any kind of environment.

Red-tails are fortunate to feed on those prey species that tend to increase with human use of the land. Squirrels, chipmunks, voles and rats are the most common mammals taken, while ducks, crows, and pigeons are common feathered food. The exponential growth of paved roads in America during the latter half of the previous century has ensured a steady supply of roadkill, a source of food that red-tails are not above.

Red-tails are in many cases responsible for human awareness of urban nature. When a city-dweller looks up and sees a large raptor soaring overhead, or perched on a ledge, it awakens the bond with wilderness inherent in all. The relatively new genre of urban nature documentary owes much to the red-tailed hawk. They are the heroes of Pale Male and the villains of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.



( Some more pictures )

Juvenile Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis)
crossposted and photographed by cottonmanifesto