While I was dealing with the goats, another drama happened – a bird drama, this time.
About 2 summers ago I made a Cat Garden at the end of the house, using 6′ netting and 4″x4″ posts concreted into the ground. It was quite a major to construct. The main aim was to contain cats – chiefly my stray Fluffy, who used to wander off over the road until he got hit by a car and lost a back leg (a cool $500 worth of operation). Given his wandering nature, and my worries about the safety of my 2 Birmans also, I decided to make this garden.
It’s about 45′ long by 35′ deep on a steep grassy, ferny bank. Basically, it worked well and though my 2 silver tabbies soon demonstrated their contempt by getting out of it, they didn’t do so very often.
My large workshop has windows looking out onto this garden at ground level – the house is dug into the bank at the back and side. The cats used to get into the garden off the top of a big bench I have standing in the workshop under the windows.
“Used to” - last autumn I had a tragedy involving my young Black Lab and a couple of my ducks, so the remaining 3 female ducks now live in the Cat Garden – Ah me! In a sense it was an inspired move, because they’ve done an excellent job of clearing out the weeds and wandering jew, which had grown rampant in there.
So the ducks were a blessing to the Cat Garden. How come I never got the cats to do a lick of work around that garden? Didn’t I build it for them? Ungrateful, lazy felines! Well now the cats have to manage in the house – I suspect that overall that’s more of a stress on me than on them, though.
About lunchtime I heard the ducks making an infernal racket – it wasn’t their normal “where’s the grub?” chant. So I went to look and got a huge shock. Standing on a rock in the garden about 4′ away from the window was an Australasian Harrier Hawk (Circus approximans). He was standing side-on to me at about eye-level and though we see them flying round here on a daily basis, I have never been as close to one as this. He was bigger than I thought. It was one of those unforgettable moments when I could have wished my eyes were a camera. The size and presence of him was something else. He looked across at me for a moment or two, then spread his great wings and took off.
Obviously this called for action. I was surprised he had come down into the garden, because it’s overhung on one side by the lower branches of a Norfolk Island Pine, has the wall of our 2 story house on another side, scrub on the two other sides, and a couple of 10 foot tree ferns growing in it. Put bluntly, it doesn’t offer a smooth flight path. But let’s face it, these raptors are the masters of flight.
I didn’t have any doubts about why he was there, so I went out with a roll of electric hot tape and laced it back and forth across the airspace.
I hoped it would serve its purpose of protecting my ducks because – funny, comical characters that they are, I love them, and I don’t want any more disasters to happen in my duck world.
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