Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 209, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 August 1916 — HAWKS of BAD CHARACTER [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

HAWKS of BAD CHARACTER

Edward B. Clark tells -7 about those / birds of prey in ' America whose bad \ habits outweigh the good points. Sharpshinned and cooper hawks are the worst j \ culprits. Look out / -%v for them - A™* \ / PrtO/-l ■Ov >^PO)OLOCK\

7 • “I T IS an easy task, but not altogether a congenial one, to write about the hawks of America iu whose fives the evil outweighs the good. When one sets down black marks : against a bird's character he invites death for the bird, and this is not a pleasant thing to do for one who believes that the interest which a bird of evil disposition adds to the general scheme of life ought to be sufficient to save the species from extermination, even if it dearly loves a chicken for dinner and a song bird for breakfast. If is easy to write about the injurious hawks of this country because there are so few of them. Most of our birds of prey, the hawks and the owls, do more good than harm. There are only a scant half dozen or so into whom nature has implanted the desire for evil deeds. Nature is supposed to do everything, or at any rate almost everything, well and so ffTnay be thair if we kill the bold buccaneer birds who do a bit of thieving now and then, we may rue it one day for some reason not yet disclosed to the human mind. ’ The scientists tell us that perhaps the two most injurious hawks in America are the sharp-shinned and the cooper hawks. These two birds do a large jpart of the thieving which the farmers of the. country lay at the door of the soaring hawk, the red-tailed, the red-shouldered, and some "others. i ~ The sharp-shinned gentleman, called Aceipiter velox, by the ornithologists, is, as somebody has put it, “a brute of a bird.” Vernon Bailey of the biological survey of the department of agriculture has written thus about this bird of more than questionable life: “Among the hawks, the sharpshinned is a veritable bushwhacker. His light body, short wings, and long tail enable him to double and turn among the brush and branches, and in a noiseless, foxlike way, pounce over a hedgerow or brush heap into the midst of a. flock; of sparrows, swoop under the low branches and pick his bird from the ground, or dart through the Ireetops and snatch one in midair from .the midst of a startled flock. His small size is so much more than compensated by his audacity that one bird often becomes the terror of the poultry yard, taking the small and lialf,grown chickens regularly, and sometimes killing and eating a fullgrown hen of many times its ownjveighL” I once saw a--sharp-shinned hawk swoop down into a flock of English

sparrows on one of (lie crowded corners of the city of Chicago. A trolley car was thundering along at the moment the sharp-sliinned mnde Its descent. It missed its prey, much to my disappointment, for I don’t like JSnglish sparrows, and I have a sneaking admiration for the bold bird which dares to make a try for its breakfast no matter what perils impend. The Cooper hawk, called by the scientists Aceipiter cooperii, is just as much of a villain, if you want to look at him that way.~&s is his brother Accipiter, surnained velox. This bird is just ns daring as the sharp-shinned, and being somewhat larger is able to attack successfully larger prey. Dr. A. K. Fisher, the foremost American authority on the birds of prey, has this to say about the freebooter under discussion : “Cooper's hawk, which resembles the sharp-shinned hawk closely in everything except size, is less northern in its- distribution. . . . The food of this hawk, like thaft of its smaller congener, consists almost entirely of wild birds and poultry, though from its superior size and strength it is able to cope successfully with much larger birds, and hence is much more “to be dreaded. . . . The flight of this species is very rapid, irregular, and usually is carried at no'great height from the ground, in all these particulars closely resembling that of the sharp-shinned hawk.” One of the most destructive of the American birds of prey is the goshawk, otherwise AccipWer atricapillus. The goshawk is a big bird, something more than a foot and a half in length, and seemingly it has the strength of —well we won’t say ten, but two. Its nesting place is either in the mountains or way up in the northern regions. It preys on game birds and rabbits in the summer season an<J in the winter it comes southward from its summer home to take its pick of the fut poultry of the land. The goshawk is a during and a hardy bird. It typifies the wild life of mountain and plain, and as such It seemingly might be allowed to keep its place in nature's plan, but sentiment usually is allowed to count for little when the loss of a prize rooster or lien is in the other side of the balance. -wNow we get away from the accipiters and get into the Genus Faleo. The duck hawk, Falsco peregrinus anaturn, is a true falcon. Florence Merriam Bailey, in her “Handbook of Birds of tiie Western United States,” says that the duck hawk ranks next to the goshawk as a fierce bird of prey. According to my way of looking at it, bad as the bird is, any man who shoots it ought to be shot himself. The duck 4iawk has that high courage which ought to appeal to everybody who has red blood iu him on his own account.

The duck hawk flies as swift and as straight as the proverbial arrow. No poultry raiseEias any grudge against this falcon, for it disdains tame and humble quarry and fives like an epicure almost wholly upon game. The duck hawk will strike down in mid air a bird of twice its weight, and it will overtake the swiftest winged duck that flies. He is a pirate and everything else that is bad, but he lives the free and untrammeled life which nature taught him to live and so if it is necessary to kill something, fed and kill nature. There probably are no injurious hawks in the United States except those which have been named. Of course this qualified statement may be disputed, but for the most part our hawks are known to be largely beneficial and concerning those about which there is some doubt the, balance of good and evil seems to be just about even. The hawks that have been named and in part described are, as one might say, the worst of the bunch.