She drew this picture to show the four chickens in the back yard to the left of the pool (with its cross-hatched safety net) and in front of the large privacy shrub (middle back) with a hawk swooping down on them. C said they were running around and making their "danger noise." By the time I got out there the hawk was sitting on the fence, then flew to a neighbor's tree, where it sat for about ten minutes, just watching.
As you can imagine, we hustled the chickens into their run where they are completely safe from the hawk.
I used my new birding book to identify the hawk which was a Swainson's Hawk light morph. I think we'll keep the chickens in their run for a few days and see if the hawk hangs around. From my reading I know they prefer to eat grasshoppers and insects like that, but during mating season they also go for small mammals and birds as large as injured ducks. Now that our four girls are our egg-laying pets, I don't want anything to happen to them!
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