Paging Foghorn Leghorn…

Meet the latest addition to the pantheon of critters hanging around my house. This one is a first though – we have a new semi-regular who has no paws, but does have wings. We haven’t had one of those before. But this one’s kinda pretty – and potentially very useful on the earning-one’s-keep scale. This is Myfanwy, and Myfanwy is a Cooper’s hawk, also known as a chicken hawk. Myfanwy’s a youngster, but has lucked out – we’ve got four acres of land, of which only the not-that-huge lawn around the house is ever mowed. The rest, due to us moving out here without anything like a tractor or a brush hog, has been growing unchecked since we bought the place in 2004. The field now reaches the lower ionosphere, and it’s full of mice and rats and snakes and frogs and other critters.

Some of these aren’t on a standard chicken hawk’s approved diet plan, but I have seen Myfanwy wolf down a small snake at the edge of the back yard (either a black snake or a small copperhead – no complaints from me either way).

Chicken hawks are smaller than most other varieties of hawks, but Myfanwy still has room to grow – quite a bit of room, despite being about as large as our two smaller cats. (This development puts quite a new spin on worrying about Oberon dashing out the door, especially since Oberon has joined the Myfanwy Fan Club, which gathers at the back door to admire the new arrival.) Fortunately for Obi, Myfanwy’s main diet is actually supposed to be smaller birds. We used to have a robust population of cardinals (any more cardinals, and I would’ve expected the Pope to show up soon); now, not so much. And noisy blue jays? Strangely absent after making their (godawful noisy crapping-on-everything) presence known early in the season. Again, no regrets here, though I’d appreciate it if Myfanwy would leave a few specimens alive to pick off the still-quite-healthy bug population.

I don’t know if Myfanwy is male or female, but the behavior patterns suggest male: stalking a specific area for food and then taking off with it (gotta keep the Mrs. and the little ones happy). Myfanwy is a Welsh name, and most of the time it’s a female, but don’t tell Myfanwy that, because I don’t want Myfanwy to claw my eyes out the next time he(?) sees me. Giving the name to a male is not unprecedented though. (In case you’re wondering, Myfanwy’s also the name of the pterodactyl who hangs around the hub in Torchwood. Very appropriate since this big bird will perch on our deck railing and look straight into the house with no trepidation. I suspect he’s thinking “Mmmmmmm… kitties!”)

So without further adieu, ladies and gentlemen, I now give you the bird.

(Wait, that sounded kinda bad.)