A few days ago Leah and I heard a loud thump that sounded like it came from our hall bathroom. I went in to check, but found nothing to account for the noise. Later I went outside and found this bird lying in the driveway, close to the house.
It seems to be a sharp-shinned hawk (Accipiter striatus), a type I was not familiar with. It was lying close to the window in one of our bedrooms, the one we use for an office. The bedroom is next to the bathroom, which explains why we thought the sound came from the bathroom.
It’s easy to understand how this happened. With very little light inside the room, the window makes a good mirror. The hawk undoubtedly thought it was flying through an opening rather than a hard surface.
The sharp-shinned hawk is the smallest hawk in the US and Canada. It summers in the far north of Alaska and Canada and winters as far south as Panama. It’s a little hard to figure from the maps of distributions, but it seems that they are around our area during non-breeding parts of the year, but apparently are so secretive that they are rarely seen.
They are the most strong sexually dimorphic of North American raptors. The males average under two-thirds the mass of females.
Our house is on top of the ridge of Lavender Mountain within a mixed hardwood and pine forest, which is their preferred habitat.
We see other types of hawks pretty often, but I had never before seen a sharp-shinned hawk. It’s unfortunate that my first sighting is of a dead bird, and one killed by our house at that.
Smokey didn’t show up for breakfast this morning, which was a very bad sign. Early this afternoon we found his remains in the woods in front of our house. All that was left was a handful of fur and some blood. It appears that a coyote caught him.
Smokey has been with us for a long time. We can’t remember when he first appeared, but we think it might have been as long as 12 or 13 years ago. He and Sylvester showed up at about the same time.
Of all of our cats, he was the most affectionate. He was the only one that really sought affection. He would jump up on the sofa beside us and lie down right next to one of us. He usually was halfway on our legs. Sometimes he sat next to our legs, looking at us. If we didn’t pet him, he would reach out and pat us with his foot.
He loved being petted.
He also loved food. He would sit beside our dining room table, staring up at us as we ate. When we fed one of the other cats, he would lie down facing their food bowl. Waiting. Waiting. Somehow he knew when we put out food for Chloe and Dusty on the front porch, and he would appear from nowhere.
He was a reliably playful cat. He played with Mollie, and tried to play with Sylvester, who was not always a willing participant. Here he is staring down a hedgehog toy we got for the dogs.
Smokey was pretty much a homebody. In the last few years he didn’t stay inside much, but we never saw him walking casually up the street towards a neighbor’s house like Sylvester.
If he wanted in, he didn’t wait to be invited, he just shoved his way around whoever happened to open the door. But when he was finished eating, he usually went straight to the door to be let back outside.
In the past we had let him and Sylvester stay inside at night, especially in cold weather, but when we moved into our new house we put little cat houses with heated pads in the garage. That was where Smokey could usually be found once it got dark.
But of course, in warm weather he usually stayed outside, we knew not where. It wasn’t obvious where he was, but we could usually find him lying under our rainwater collection tank, or under my truck, or under our little Mule utility vehicle.
He might not have been immediately visible, but he didn’t disappear for hours like Sylvester. That’s why Leah was so worried when Smokey wasn’t waiting at the door Sunday morning. I tried to reassure her that he would show up, and that it was too early to start worrying. But secretly I was a little worried, myself, because it was so unlike him.
So when I took Sam for his walk Sunday morning, I looked along the side of the road for a little furry, gray body. When Sam stopped with his nose up in the air, I let him sniff. If he wanted to check out something at the side of the road, I let him. We checked out a few places on the road in front of the house, but I never saw anything.
After lunch, I usually take Sam out and let him run free around the yard. On this occasion, he was suspicious of something on the far side of the driveway, but I couldn’t find anything. So I went down into the front of our yard and started pulling weeds. After a few minutes Sam came over and went into the woods beside the yard. He sniffed around for a while, and then seemed to find something. When I went into the woods, I found what he had found. It was a big mass of gray fur with a few leaves spotted with blood. The ground was scuffed around where the fur was. This was almost certainly the scene of the crime.
One of our neighbors had stopped on Friday when I took Sam down to the mailbox and told me her young kids had seen a coyote in their yard. Their big dog had chased it away. We talked about when and where we had seen coyotes. One night shortly after we moved into our current house we had seen two coyotes running around in the front yard, just into the woods. I went out with a flashlight and Zeke (on a leash, naturally), and eventually the coyotes left. We haven’t seen any in the yard since then, although they are often more active at night.
But Smokey was almost certainly taken by a coyote. There really isn’t any other predator that could have done this. We have (or have had) foxes, but they typically mind their own business around the cats. I don’t think any of our birds of prey could take a cat the size of Smokey. So there really isn’t anything else.
Now we have to worry about Chloe, Dusty and Sylvester. We know Sylvester is a wanderer. That may be a problem. We also know that for some reason Chloe has taken to sleeping in the woods. Her favorite spot is about 20 feet from where we found Smokey’s remains. We would bring her inside at night, but she absolutely hates it. She runs from Leah if she tried to get her to bring her in. And Chloe and Mollie do not get along. So there isn’t much we can do for her. Fortunately, Dusty stays on the porch almost all the time, usually only going down to the yard for bathroom breaks.
Of course we knew that coyotes were at least a theoretical threat for the cats. Now we know they are a real threat, and they are in our yard.
I posted about seeing a young armadillo when walking the dogs last week. I mentioned that the armadillo showed no fear whatsoever, and I also mentioned that I doubted that Zeke would have much trouble piercing its armor. Well, we saw what I think is the same armadillo a couple of days ago. It was scrabbling around in the same place. I thought it was a good opportunity to get a photo where you could actually see the armadillo, so I pulled out my phone and tried to take a shot. I had to hold two leashes in one hand while I took the shot with the other hand. This is what I got.
The armadillo is just above and slightly to the right of Sam’s head. Immediately after I took this shot, Zeke lunged and clamped the armadillo in his jaws. With one hand holding my phone, I wasn’t able to restrain Zeke. He shook the armadillo violently, and I could hear some crunching. I shouted “NO!” as loud as I could. I figured dogs all over Texas Valley stopped whatever they were doing and looked around. Zeke is hard of hearing, but he heard me this time. He dropped the armadillo and it ran away down the slope as fast as I have seen one move.
I have no idea whether Zeke injured the armadillo. It might have suffered serious, even mortal wounds. I have not seen or heard it since this unfortunate (for the armadillo) event.
About two million years age, a relative of the armadillo as large as a rhinoceros lived in South America. Smaller cousins lived as far north as Canada. All of these forms disappeared in the ice ages long before humans inhabited North America. At the start of the 20th century, the nine-banded armadillo was present in Texas. By the 1930s, they were in Louisiana and by 1954 they had crossed the Mississippi River heading east. In the 1950s, they were introduced into Florida and began heading north. Today, some maps (Georgia Wildlife Web: http://museum.nhm.uga.edu/gawildlife/ gaww.html) show them to be restricted to South Georgia but, in fact, they are present as far north as Athens and Rome, Georgia. They occur throughout the South from Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas through Missouri, eastern Tennessee and into South Carolina. They are currently absent from North Carolina but are likely to continue to move northward along the coast and into the Piedmont. Because they do not tolerate cold temperatures (below about 36 degrees F), several studies suggest that farther northward migration into the Appalachian Mountains will be limited.
Armadillos are not my favorite animals. I don’t like to see them killed by our dogs, but I would just as soon they would go back home to Texas.
Leah and i were on our way into town for dinner on Thursday when we saw a turtle crossing Technology Parkway, a four-lane, divided road. As we approached we realized it was huge. I thought it was a snapping turtle. We turned around and went back to make sure it crossed safely. When we got out of the car and approached it, we realized it was not a snapping turtle. But it was still huge, the largest turtle I have seen that was not a snapper.
Here it is with Leah’s foot for scale.
It was northbound in the east-bound lanes, so it had the rest of those lanes, the grassy median, and the west-bound lanes to cross. Traffic was very light, but we were afraid it might be hit, so I picked it up and carried it to the far side of the road. I found a wet place near a boggy creek to put it down, and after posing with Leah’s foot, it scooted off.
The turtle was close to a foot across and weighed at least 10 pounds. I held it just aft of the center of its shell, just within reach of the claws on its hind legs. When I picked it up it immediately started making swimming motions. The back claws just barely scratched my hands. I held it out away from my body because I expected what came next — urine. As a non-physician, I would say that it was a healthy, clear stream that missed my clothes but might have dripped on my shoe.
Just before we picked it up a pickup truck came from the west and stopped. The couple inside said the turtle looked like the one they had moved a few days ago, on that day traveling in the opposite direction.
I did some online research and decided it was a river cooter (Pseudemys concinna), which I had never heard of. A distinguishing feature is a C shape on the second scute. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that when I had it in my hands, and it can’t be seen in the photo. The shell was wet and a little muddy.
Based on the Web site information, the other turtle that can be confused with the river cooter is the Florida cooter, but the Florida cooter’s range covers south Georgia, not north Georgia. So river cooter seems to be a good guess.
From the Wikipedia page on river cooter: “The name “cooter” may have come from an African word “kuta” which means “turtle” in the Bambara and Malinké languages, brought to America by African slaves.”
Happy 4th of July. Today is the day we in the United States commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It’s also the day we celebrated Leah’s father’s birthday. He would be 96 today.
We won’t be watching the Washington DC events. We aren’t interested in seeing a campaign rally right at the moment.
Since there seems to us to be so little to actually celebrate in this country these days, I’ll just post a picture of a hummingbird posing on our feeder. Birds don’t care about the kinds of things we do. Give them some sugar water and they’re happy to zoom around and chase each other away.
Leah pointed out the bird sitting on the feeder hook. Once I noticed I saw that they often perch there.
Added on the Fourth: Leah and I were sitting at the table after breakfast considering whether to go see the local fireworks display this evening. I looked up the location and found that here in Rome, they decided to hold the Fourth of July fireworks on the third.
Copyright 2013 Mark V. Paris
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