Bird Watching: Hawk around our feeders, 1 by chris8796

chris8796 wrote:
In my experience, the genus of Buteo hawks (red-tails, red-shouldered, etc) are no threat to healthy live birds, with one exception. They are big, strong and less agile, and primarily eat rodents. In nature, they probably only eat birds by nest robbing or getting injured or sick birds. The one exception is urban birds learning to hunt pigeons and other "distracted" urban birds. We have a local Red tail hawk that can get the occasional pigeon and even then I didn't believe it till I saw it. I assumed he may have stole it from a Coopers Hawk, but there are many reports of Red tails hunting urban Pigeons. I've also seen falconers catch red tails using a Pigeon tethered to the ground as bait, since it can be seen flopping around from a long distance.

My feeder birds don't worry about Buteos in the least, but can spot an Accipiter 500 yds away and get nervous. I've never seen any hawk get the voles feeding on the spilled seed, but possums are very good at catching the voles.