Sharp Shinned Hawk by Armen Woosley
Via Flickr:
It flew into our living room window this afternoon so while it was regaining it’s composure I ran got my camera and clicked off a few.
Peregrine Fund field biologists Brian Mutch and Paul Juergens have been hard at work surveying Aplomado Falcon nests and banding nestlings along Texas’s Gulf Coast. So far, they have found three occupied territories that were not used by the falcons last year, which is really great news. They report that productivity is also good this year with quite a few pairs having produced three nestlings.
Learn more: https://peregrinefund.org/projects/aplomado-falcon
compared to hawks, falcons have shorter and weaker talons and shorter beaks! this, combined with a lighter overall build, means that falconkind is really badly unsuited to do the hawk/eagle/owl thing where they just plunge out of the sky and stab a rabbit to death with their feet.
so what they do instead is fly really high in the air, keeping an eye out for unwary birds they could get the drop on, and then they DROP. and as they drop, they curl their talon into a fist, which they use to strike their unwary prey at speeds well in excess of a hundred miles per hour. (this either stuns or outright kills the unlucky target)
and this method works so well that they can even take down birds much larger than themselves, like ducks!