Friday: The Lesson

Friday morning Tom awakes, it's 8am, 10 below zero, the sun is shining (though not yet on the lodge), but no sounds of birds with song. He opens the office blinds and flush up against the window on the front porch bench sits the Cooper's hawk. Tom's out the door and the Cooper's is in to the Desert Willow.

Ten minutes after clearing the Cooper's and feeding the song birds the front yard looks like this

Later in the day Tom sees the Sharp-shinned hawk and as he types this the Loggerhead Shrike sits in the Cottonwood tree. After a solid month of chasing off predators, it's made little, if any difference. They eat songbirds. It's what they do. It's how they live. Base Camp is deep in songbirds and as long as it remains so it will be filled with predators. Tom has two choices. Keep feeding the songbirds and keeping it a target rich environment, or stop feeding them, diminishing the number of songbirds. If the predators aren't chasing them here, they're chasing them somewhere. The predator kill ratio isn't very high here so he'll continue feeding songbirds and do what he can to fend off predators.