I'm in your house...

Ok; this is sort of in relation to my last deviation Wraith [link] even if it is COMPLETELY unrelated… sort of…

This hawk; was in my house, in MY ROOM when I was working on the Wraith picture, well not exactly when I was working on it… but during the day.

Yes, a HAWK, in the house… in my room…

Allow me to explain

I had spent a fair portion of the morning playing Creed 2, yes I know I’m obsessed, but its fun! I took no more than a five minute break to run to the bathroom; just as I was finishing up I heard this loud ‘thump’ and instantly whistled, thinking one of my cats had brought home the big bully cat from next door. Normally you whistle and the evil thing wets itself and runs away. Then I walked out into the lounge room / dining room to find a big bird flapping like mad against the dining room window.

I think I actually said… wtf out loud…

Then I reached for the nearest piece of cloth I could find; which happened to be a recently cleaned towel and spent a few moments trying to get it over the bird. The girls (aka my cats) were trying to help… Dudley (the little one) was particularly interested even though this bird was the same size as her! So I got him wrapped in the towel and started to walk him around to the back door; girls in tow … when he wrestled his way out of my hands and back onto the floor, before being herded into my room by the cats. He half landed on the floor and started stalking towards the cats; looking twice as big as them with his wings fanned out. So I shut the door as he smacked into my fly screen… I then had to answer my phone. You see, when I had seen him I assumed the girls had brought him in… it was kind of incriminating that they were both sitting there watching him and thus I had texted my aunt and uncle; the latter of which chose to ring me when I was trying to recapture the hawk.

He told me to get photos; make sure the bird was ok, and if so let him go. If not, put him in a box somewhere to deal with when they got home. So I snapped the photo of him flapping around like mad and then when to catch him again [the big image]. Let me tell you fly screen doesn’t help. First he smacked into it as I got the towel over him… and I had to let go because he had accidently grabbed onto my finger and wasn’t letting go if I wasn’t. He then got tangled in the fly screen… with me standing there going ‘let go of the fly screen… just let go…’

After a few moments I managed to pry him off, I nearly got smacked in the face with his wings a few times and had to touch them once or twice without the towel before he hurt himself. When I had him wrapped in the towel again I took another photo [little one; where he looks like he wants to eat me] and took him outside. Where I unwrapped him and watched him takeoff and sit in one of the nearby trees… panting for a few… I snuck back in to get my camera and took a few photos of him in the tree [link] When I went back inside to grab my phone to text people that he was ok he headed off… leaving a rather empty tree when I stepped back outside to check on him.

So, I hope he’s still ok…

The girls spent the next three hours looking for him… occasionally shaking when they caught his smell… not sure who was more frightened the cats or the bird. Kind of glad I only had two out of the three cats around at the time, because if Chamois was there she would have tried to eat him… where as Dudley didn’t know what to do (this from a cat who plays with snakes) and Cubbie was scared (Cubbie, being the biggest cat, she’s like a cat and a half).

When my uncle got home I retold the whole story to him and showed him the photos… We worked out that he had prolly flown in through the back door (which had been wide open most of the day) and into the adjacent dining room window (where I found him); and that the cats had nothing to do with it. Not after they figured out how big he was. Had the window been open he would have flown straight though the house… (there is no fly screen on that one) and I would have never have known. Then again if I had been still playing creed 2 he prolly wouldn’t have even gotten that far. O.o


I did a bit of net surfing and I think he is a Collared Sparrowhawk [link] (apparently they’ll follow their prey indoors)



So yeah; all this happened Yesterday (the 4/12/09) for me