It’s a hawk on a cold tin roof





RAPTOR—Red-tailed hawks easily rustle up meals on the author’s property, butfind the rooftop a challenge to navigate.

RAPTOR—Red-tailed hawks easily rustle up meals on the author’s property, butfind the rooftop a challenge to navigate.

It’s a handy turn of events to have outgrown my childhood penchant towards queasiness at sight of icky things, because my backyard’s resident red-tailed hawk has really been pushing the gruesome envelope lately.

The hawk has long been a regular on the limbs of the big coast live oak that lords over my property in rural Agoura. An ivysmothered slope provides shelter for the critters the hawk craves.

A cleared area where I have a patio, pathways and gardens entices those critters, especially quail families, to emerge from cover to grub, browse or peck as they rustle up meals.

So the hawk is perched on an avian easy street—just hang out preening or enjoying the shade and breeze until some movement catches its eye.

Then an intense gaze tracks the prey. A powerful plummet follows.

Almost daily a shower of gray quail feathers would drift from my old roof to coat the ground like dirty snow. When up on the roof sweeping off leaf litter I’d encounter grisly items like a severed wing or tiny bones.

The persecuted quail may find an ally in my new roof, which is a type only used on older mobile home models such as mine. It is not a replacement roof per se, but “an aluminum rollover” concept intended to shield the original roof from rain infiltration. Think of party leftovers wrapped in tin foil and you’ve sort of got the picture.

The roofing material is so lightweight a jab of a screwdriver might dent it, which is bad news when considering the damage a hawk’s sharp talons and beak could render to such a surface.

On the plus side for me and potential rooftop slaughter victims of the hawk, is this: The new roof’s surface is slippery and cold in winter, and has been given a tautly-stretched pitch that makes traction difficult. On the worn old roof I could clop around without peril as I cleaned rain gutters; on the new one a misstep nearly sent me skidding off it into oblivion.

It’s a roof posing as a slick skating pond, and like me the hawk discovered this the hard way.

Birds of prey tend to appear confident and methodical—incapable of slapstick maneuvers. Yet there came the red-tailed hawk attempting a landing on that cold tin roof, resembling a klutz-footed acrobat who’d failed his Cirque du Soleil audition. It scrabbled and flapped frantically to steady itself to keep from (1) somersaulting over the swamp cooler, (2) bouncing across the patio cover, and finally (3) hurtling head first into a patch of giant agaves bristling with barbs.

Close call, good save, and a lesson learned.

Quail families living in terror caught a break that day—and I hope they had a good laugh, too, at their tumbling tormentor’s expense.

Glasser is a writer fascinated by the flora and fauna surrounding her home in the Santa Monica Mountains. Reach her at ranchomulholla@gmail.com.


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