The willow is nearby and in a very marshy part of the yard and during the summer heat, they'd drape themselves festively over the lower branches to escape the unbearable heat.
They weren't bothering anybody but one day he was weed-whacking the property line before we have the solid wood fence and spied them.
He “meant well”, for what that's worth.
We have all that stuff too and eagles.
A couple years ago one of them spiraled right down at my Portuguese Podengo Medio while I wasn't but a short distance from her.
It didn't give a flip that I and several other large dogs were right there..it wanted to eat her.
I lunged for her and that scared her so bad that she flattened out on the ground just as the thing swooped over us both, brushing my head with its wings.
I grabbed her up and ran for the door with the other dogs following.
The infernal chicken hawks have just about wiped out all the small mammals locally and now I see them perched along the highway on the powerlines starving, hoping for some roadkill.
“Protecting” the red tails sure worked out real well for them.
[some fruit loop Democrat “cat lady” who lived in the city near here 'never saw any’ and talked Glendenning into believing they were ‘endangered’...yeah, right]
I often wonder what she'd think if she saw them picking off her precious stray cats in the spring when their chicks hatch.
We have a lot of strange and ignorant people here.
Haven't seen any willow (most of the trees are maple, some oak, some Hemlock) but have a pond probably a good 1/8 mile or more back into the property. Thing's about 30-40 feet in diameter and was used for watering livestock when this was an operating dairy farm - which it hasn't been for a number of years now. You sort of have to weed-whack your way back into it now because of all the opportunistic brush that has grown up around it. (An old aerial photo from 1976 or so shows that this entire piece of property was bare of trees except for the Hemlocks near the house and a big oak back by the pond - now trees have grown up everywhere and thorn bushes, probably wild rose of some sort grow in the remaining spots..)
The first time we worked our way back to it after we moved in (we saw it on the satellite view) we noticed that there were goldfish in it. Regular generic carp are native and I would have expected them as maybe a possibility since the pond has a small rivlet feeding it, but goldfish - not exactly. (OK, so they are fancy carp - but they're not native!) However, this past summer we had quite a number of sightings of a Blue Heron flying over coming from the direction of the pond. Last fall when the grandkids were visiting we trekked back to the pond to check on the goldfish and we provided the kids with some stale bread to feed them. Didn't see a single goldfish.. The heron probably was stopping at his private restaurant each evening for a fishfest, and all we managed to get from our inspection tour were a bunch of ticks that we spent the rest of the evening picking off.. (I keep saying that 'next year' I'll clean up the path back to the pond - but so far next year hasn't arrived!)