Birds of the Day

One of the great things about birding is that you don’t need rare birds to have rare experiences. Yesterday I went along on a Tucson Audubon trip, ably led by Chris Benesh and Dave Stejskal, to Whitewater Draw and the Sulphur Springs Valley. We had more than our share of rarish birds, among them a Dunlin, a very late Snowy Egret, and a regionally scarce Blue Goose among the Snow and Ross’s Geese. And we enjoyed great views of some common birds too: a Virginia Rail scampered along one of the dikes at Whitewater, a good 10 or so Ferruginous Hawks and individual Bald and Golden Eagles were out on the grasslands, and of course–much as it pains a Nebraska boy to admit it–the Sandhill Crane show was impressive as always.

But the most memorable part of a memorable day came as we were leaving Whitewater Draw. The vehicle I was in paused briefly for a fence-perched Crissal Thrasher, then almost drove past another one of the numerous Red-tailed Hawks that had moved in for the winter. But we stopped to see what it was eating–a good decision indeed.

Red-tailed Hawks aren’t the most discriminating gourmands around, and I usually see them munching on roadkilled rabbits, or still-writhing snakes, or sluggish spermophiles. Very rarely have I seen one eating a bird, and this was the first time I’d ever seen one dining on Barn Owl! Neither Bent nor BNA lists Barn Owls among the prey recorded for Red-tailed Hawk, and I couldn’t have been more surprised. Of course, we did not see the hawk capture the owl, and it’s possible that it merely scavenged it from the road, but the corpse was still relatively intact and relatively pliable when we saw it, suggesting that if the owl had been hit by a car, it had been a glancing blow inflicted at high noon.

Neither of the birds involved is a rare one in southeast Arizona. We’d seen dozens of Red-tailed Hawks and at least two Barn Owls by the time we witnessed this post-top banquet. But to see one consuming the other was, I suspect, a once-in-a-lifetime sighting for most of us, and one to top anything else we saw all day–even if one of the birds of the day was dead.