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Sammie0627's avatar

Keep the positive attitude that BB will show up. I’ve only had one pileated many years ago. He followed me when I walked outside one tree behind me all the time. I would so love to see another.

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Grant Stevenson's avatar

I hear your concern for BB and know darn well it's valid, of course. Cooper’s, now in the Asturnia genus, are know woodpecker hunters when attacking and consuming larger prey (ie larger biomass) is more efficient in colder weather, as you point out. My subscription to the Birds of the World life histories has temporarily lapsed, and I haven't the print species account anymore, but John Kenneth Terres's The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds says they adore flickers, other woodpeckers, meadowlarks, young pheasants, and other like medium-sized prey items, including rabbits when they more rarely take mammals (but are more likely to do so than "sharpies").

Back when falconry was unregulated during the Great Depression, my father Fred was a teenage hawker with a female Cooper's Hawk, a species no longer used because they're nasty. It took two crows "simulataneously", probably one after another, but who knows, in the air at the famous Flourtown meet in 1940 when my Dad was 14 years old. Scary. He had a scar where she put a talon straight through his palm.

He decried falconry after that as cruel, abusive, and underegulated and chose to go hawkwatching instead on Pennsylvania's Kittatinny Ridge, an appreciative preference for wild raptors that I inherited and enjoy today. For one thing, his family had Gyrfalcons, "Northern" or American Goshawks, and Peregrine Falcons, all future threatened species, the goshawk being extremely endangered and possibly extinct here in PA now as a breeder. (Hawk Mountain and the state are working on that, it being a difficult bird to find). Grandad, Uncle Tibby, and Dad used to go to the Hudson River Palisades in New York City in their Model T to take peregrine eyases to raise and train, food acquisition during the Depression being half the reason. They eventually had four peregrines that way. I checked the records in Bill Hickey's Peregrine Falcon recovery book in Muhlenberg College's library and the final year of eyas-taking in the 30's that led to the palisade extirpation that decade was exactly 4. Worse, other falconers took the eggs. Thus the need at least for regulation! Falconers eventually weren't the main threat, a position taken by DDT, and played an integral role in recovery with their knowledge of remaining eiries to obtain stock for the captive-breeding program by Tom Cade, though I believe, sounding the first alarm about DDT, too, was Hickey's idea. Hickey, being Aldo Leopold's successor at the University of Wisconsin, of course, I believe possibly being an old haunt of yours maybe...(?).

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