A red-tailed hawk soaring in the sky
Gary Gross, South Central Power
Q. Chip: I was visiting my dad in western Preble County, Ohio, in late January of this year and saw this happening outside his kitchen window (please see attached video clip). My dad is soon to be 94 years old, and feeding fox squirrels in winter is one of the small pleasures he gets in life. We watched this red-tailed hawk eating field corn off the cob, and I asked Dad if he had ever seen this before; he said no. Curious about the behavior, I searched online to see if these hawks make corn a regular part of their diet and was surprised that in no instance was I able to find that to be the case. I guess several weeks of snow cover and severe cold made the redtail desperate for any meal he could find, despite the minimal protein that corn provides. Also in the video, notice a wary fox squirrel under the pine tree behind the hawk, keeping a close eye on him.
On another subject, I wanted to let you know that I enjoyed your article several months back in Ohio Cooperative Living print magazine about ring-necked pheasants. It brought back fond memories of bird hunting — bobwhite quail in addition to pheasants — in western Ohio and eastern Indiana with my dad back in the early 1970s, when I was in high school. After the back-to-back brutal winters of 1977-1978, our bird hunting days were over as the quail and pheasants have been very scarce since.
A. Gary: Thanks for sending your remarkable video clip! Like you, I have never heard of this particular behavior in redtails. They normally eat small mammals and occasionally a snake or two. I agree with you that the bird was probably desperately hungry, possibly even starving, to do such a thing. Also, the hawk appears to be an immature redtail, so maybe its hunting skills were not that of an adult bird quite yet.
I took the liberty of forwarding your video clip to Kevin McGowan, an avian educator and raptor expert at the prestigious Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, to get his take on it, and here’s what he had to say: “I have never heard of such a thing. Interesting.”
And thanks, Gary, for your kind words about my ring-necked pheasant story in the November 2024 issue of OCL; glad to hear you enjoyed it. While writing the story, it brought back similar pleasant memories of my father and I hunting pheasants together years ago.
