Although I haven't posted in a while I assure you "A Small Tucson Desert Garden" is alive and thriving in Tucson, Arizona. In a later post I will have some photos of what the garden looks like now. BUT, today, I just had to share a very special visit by a baby hawk and have added some photos and video. We believe this particular hawk is a "Cooper's Hawk", although we generally have had Harris Hawks living here.
We have had hawks living in our Eucalyptus trees for years. As a side note, Eucalyptus trees are big, beautiful and thrive in our desert, BUT I do not recommend you plant them near your garden or home. They are messy, the leaves and roots are mildly toxic to plants growing near them, and the branches are brittle and can break during a monsoon storm.
Our hawks are majestic predator birds that are thrilling to watch and help keep our garden mice and other rodent population to a minimum. Their nests are large - and now we know why, their young are huge. "Baby Huey", as we affectionately call him, is almost as big as the mother - and he still can't fly!
I had wanted to get photos of Baby Huey and his mother together, but she appears only to visit him at feeding time. This consists of swooping down, dropping a desert mouse in front of him, and then shooting back to a pine tree across the street - no time for a shot. Eventually, she flies back to our Eucalyptus tree and perches on her "look-out" branch to watch Huey waddle around our yard. The mother will squawk at us if we get close to Huey, but, being used to seeing us in the garden, she will allow us to get within photo distance before warning us off.
The following is a link to a musical video I posted on YouTube of a song I wrote about likening the relationship between God and man to a mother bird and her chicks. I posted this song a couple of months before Baby Huey's visit.
http://youtu.be/3u_tuy61gcI
We now have a pic of the mother (right). She is small, compared to the father, and from what we can tell does most of the parenting which includes dive bombing us when we come near one of her babies. We now wear protective head gear when picking up the mail knowing the path runs near the nest. So far no injuries, except Susan did bang up her knee trying to dodge an attack and ran into our heavy wrought iron door. The larger father hangs out across the street in Carl and Barb's pine tree. He is quite impressive sitting on his big pine branch and surveys our house it seems 24/7. To our knowledge, that's pretty much all he does. When the mother isn't observing her chicks from the Eucalyptus tree in our yard, she is out hunting. As you will see, she does a good job at this as the 2 remaining immature hawks are now as big, if not bigger, than she is!
We have had hawks living in our Eucalyptus trees for years. As a side note, Eucalyptus trees are big, beautiful and thrive in our desert, BUT I do not recommend you plant them near your garden or home. They are messy, the leaves and roots are mildly toxic to plants growing near them, and the branches are brittle and can break during a monsoon storm.
