WNYBill

Member
I was fitting a piece of ground yesterday and watching the mice run around me when a Red Tail Hawk swooped down and grabbed one right in front of the tractor, almost hit it. All I saw were out stretched legs and talons. They are some kind of predator!

Bill
 
I'm amazed how animals are drawn to fields worked by farmers knowing you're stirring up food for them. Yesterday when brush hogging a bunch of swallows showed up looking for bugs getting flushed out of the grass. Around here plowing in the spring time attracts a bunch of sea gulls and they know to follow the plow for best results. Animals learn pretty quick when it comes to food.
 
We have cattle egrets here that come around when we do field work.when we upgraded from an Oliver 1950 to a 1566 international years ago the faster tractor would throw big clods of dirt from the plow pinning the birds.i made a few “bird release stops”
 
When I was mowing hay many years ago, a flock of turkey buzzards landed in the field- between 30 and 40 of them. The looked around for mice for a few minutes, then they all took off. I've never seen it before or since. I had always thought they were kind of solitary. Must have been migrating.
 
coshoo, out close to my old child hood home, there was a "colony" of buzzards.

That's the only place I have ever seen such behavior, like you say they are usually solitary.

I think what got them started, there was a catfish farm there at one time. You could pay to fish, and they also sold them. Evidently they were cleaning and disposing the heads and guts on the ground. Several times the dog found catfish heads in the yard that had to have been dropped by the buzzards.

Then there was a cell tower built on the same property. That became their roost! Hundreds of them! They tried putting the anti-roost spikes up, they just used them for nest holders!

I guess they are still there, haven't been back in years, but they sure had a good colony going!
 
We had a large dead tree that had fallen in the field behind the elem. school. A colony of buzzards roosted there. One kid got brave and hit one in the head with a baseball bat. The bird's head swung around and out poured the most wretched vomit imaginable, covering the kid who hit him. He smelled so bad that his mother has to come get him. It seemed fair to me, Mother Nature's reward for his vile behavior.
 
There was a mechanic that worked for my dad back in the 60's.

He told a story about driving down the road and disturbing a group of buzzards chowing down on road kill.

As usual they waited to the last second to fly, and one got clipped by the front of the car, which sent it spinning into the open back window!

He said it was flapping around in the back seat, bleeding and puking...

He stopped and opened the doors and it took off, but what a mess it left behind! Said he never got rid of the smell to the day he sold the car!
 
Used to have mice by the millions scurrying everywhere when we mowed hay. The Sparrow and Redtail Hawks had a field day. Once the coyotes moved in we've see very few mice, and the hawks have moved on to greener pastures.
 
I had a hawk that would hang around while I was mowing hay. He thought the haybine was a lunch wagon He knew that you didn’t go back where it was already cut and would sit in the windrow when I drove by eating crushed mice. He would also perch on the round bales after I got finished and look for mice. I have a picture of him setting on the tractor seat when I left the baler setting in the lane next to the field.
 
Used to have a buzzard who followed my plough on foot, gobbling up worms as I turned them up! Never seen another bird of prey do that! Jim
 
They will 'flock' if given about 20 dead feral hogs to chow down on.
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I had muscovy ducks around for a number of years.For more than a few years they would repopulate quite efficiently. The year I took over the field by the house to grow forage for my small cattle herd I plowed soybean stubble. Ducklings a bit before full feather filled the furrow in front of the tractor writhing over one another, staying ahead of the wheel and getting pretty much every worm I would guess. I rode the clutch ready to stop but never had to.
 

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