Beware the hawks
I sympathize with any one who has a pet “gone missing,” especially from their own back yard.
However, unless you have tracks or actually see the coyotes, I suggest the environmental press on the large hunting birds will cause them to “hunt” small dogs and cats as well.
I live in College Park East and have had one of the very large hawks come into my postage stamp size back yard and kill a full-grown rodent and then carry it off! The rodent was the size of my cat and dogs!
That was two years ago.
Since then, I have observed the hawks circling my back yard and my front bedroom second story balcony.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m very happy that the hawks caught the rodent, but they are not welcome to my dogs and cat.
My neighbors didn’t believe me at first, but over time they have seen the hunting pairs in the spring and later the younger birds when they are learning to hunt. None of us let our small dogs/cats out of doors without going with them.
Believe me when I say the big birds are not all that fearful of us. Recently one of the younger birds caught a dove in my back yard—and that is when I found out by experience that when a bird can’t carry off the weight of what they have killed that they tear a part off, take it away and then come right back for another piece.
I have a feeding station for the wild birds and another for the younger birds, larger than the one that caught the dove, land and set on top of my feeding station. It sat very quietly for several minutes in hopes of a smaller bird or etc. would not notice him/her. I was in my kitchen not more than 25 feet away and my moving around didn’t bother him (or her) at all.
I won’t contest that coyotes hunt smaller animals, but I don’t want them to get a bum rap either.
Remember the golf course and the large parks have big trees that are good for the hawks to build their nests in and then they have to feed their young. So you better watch the sky as well as what is on the ground.
Jeanette I. Fischer
Seal Beach
Re-rebuttal about coyotes and humans
After reading and re-reading the rebuttle (“evil humans”) to my letter (“Stop the insanity, you humans!”) and this week’s, Letter to the editor, (“Re: Present coyote threat”): One thought kept passing through my head, “Oh … we are even worse off than I thought.”
With people who think like this, we are doomed for sure. “Live each day as if it’s your last,” has a whole new meaning these days.
Hopefully nobody takes these people seriously.
Signed a concerned Earthling,
Mrs. Chani Demello
