Hawks at my feeder :( (1 Viewer)

Hey all!
I have been feeding the birds in my backyard for about 2 months now. I have large numbers of black-capped chickadees and gold finches which are my favourites. I also have cardinals, blue jays, grackles, starlings, mourning doves, red-winged blackbirds and sparrows. This evening I was sitting in my house and I looked outside to see a sharp-shinned hawk standing in my willow tree where my feeders are. I was instantly overcome with fear for my birds, so I let my dogs outside to bark and I also shouted at it and it quickly flew away.

I am very worried for my birds now, as I love them and I regularly have 15+ gold finches at the feeder daily. Will he eat my clinger-type birds as well as doves. I am a bird lover, but I do not want to feed these predatory types. How can I scare them away so they wont come around?
Please, help!!

1h2m

Hello and welcome to the forum from the staff and moderators.

I am afraid you have come across a dilemma for many backyard bird feeders. If we feed the song birds the predators are sure to come around, it is just part of nature.

Your sharp-shinned hawk looks very much like the sparrowhawks we get here in the uk. It's not pretty at times but you just have to accept that nature is nature and that the birds you attract may also end up on the menu for someone else. Sometimes it's too easy to think of the small birds we attract as our 'children' but they live in a harsh world and so do the hawks, which as a predator are often living quite a precarious and persecuted life.

Try not to see the hawk as a baddie, they're really not - after all, is the chickadee a baddie for killing innocent caterpillars?

Yes, we all go through that.
When we make a birdfeeder, we have, also, made a bird of prey feeder, a mosquito feeder etc.

Whenever one puts out food for animals, one sets off a chain reaction of life.

This isn't a mall where one can pick and choose. You'll be getting rats and mice and everything that feeds off of them, too. All I can say is, pull up a chair and watch the show. It's going to get wild....

One of my favorite sayings is, "This is not a Walt Disney production, this is Planet Earth. And Planet Earth is a very dangerous place, filled with beautiful things."

One thing you can do to keep predation to a minimum is to position the feeders near bushes or other cover into which the small fry can flee when the hawk attacks. Depending on how your yard is laid out, this could help a lot. With regard to predation being “natural”, of course it is, but so is death by starvation yet that doesn't stop us from putting out bird seed every winter.

This topic seems to come up a lot here! The best advice I know is that if you see a raptor watching your feeders regularly, you should just shut them down for a few days. By most accounts these are rare and opportunistic moments and as far as I know there is no real evidence that Accipters at least, systematically hunt at bird feeders. The advice @fugl gave about locating your feeders close to cover is also very good.

Hi and welcome to the forum
I would say just leave it as it is just nature, but the point is that you want it gone.

How about putting up more feeders to spread the small bird out a bit. This should decrease the number gettish killed, and may even attract more birds to replace those that were killed.

Wow guys, thank you for the warm welcome and all of the advice!
Very friendly bunch you have here
I haven't seen him yet today, although he (or she) could've come during the day. I'm pretty sure all 12 of my gold finches came for their feeding this morning!
I don't mind mice and rodents, thankfully.
I have moved my feeders to part of the tree with thick branches in hopes to deter the hawk.
We'll see how it goes!
Thanks so much.
1h2m