On the way in from the parking lot yesterday, I caught up with a colleague from Mechanical Engineering, who was on a bike, but had stopped to look at one of the local raptors. There are at least two red-tailed hawks living on campus, and one of them was on the ground only ten or fifteen feet from the sidewalk. It had some sort of small object in its talons, and pecked at it as I was walking up.
The object in question turned out to be a pine cone, and while I was watching, it sort of hopped up into the air, and pounced on… another pine cone. This was at least the fourth pine cone to get this treatment, as my colleague had already seen it done a couple of times.
“Wow,” I thought, “Our campus is home to the world’s stupidest raptor.”
Yesterday afternoon, after work, I played pick-up soccer with a bunch of students, faculty, and staff, on the football field, right next to the path I was on in the morning. While I was running a warm-up lap, I saw the hawk again, perched on the fence, cheerfully disembowelling a squirrel.
I guess it was just practicing in the morning, to get the technique down.
(The picture above is originally from this site.)