Hey, That's Avian Harassment! When the Little Guys Get to Win

 Allow me a few moments to relate a story...

Those who've known me in my latter fatter days will have a hard time believing that I was once half the man I am today. I mean that literally; I was 6'2" and weighed 130 pounds. That meant that I was better adapted to competing on the cross-country team as opposed to, say, football. We did okay in those days, but the real winners among our high school teams were the water polo players. Big, heavy, but buoyant, those guys fought dirty underwater and made mincemeat of the other teams in the conference.

Somewhere along the way, someone suggested a tackle football game between the monstrous water polo players and the skinny, mostly short cross-country runners. To say we looked overmatched was an under(water)statement. But come the end of the season (when injuries wouldn't be as consequential) the game was on. If you consider that I was the main lineman and tackle, you can guess at the effectiveness of both defense and offense. It was going to be a bloodbath.

But it wasn't.

We were small, nimble, and fast. When they tried a run up the middle, we mostly got knocked over, but we got up and swarmed the ball carrier. They scored a few touchdowns. When we had the ball, we linemen got knocked over every time, but the quarterback could run fast, and so could the receivers. When the game was over, we prevailed. The little guys were victorious for once!

I remembered that game from so many years ago because of two pictures I took this week. They're grainy and out of focus, but they show hawks being harassed by much smaller birds. In the first picture, a Western Kingbird (Tyrannus verticalis) is chasing and attacking a Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) above the Tuolumne River Parkway Trail in Waterford. The other shows a Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) attacking a Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensus) on the campus of CSU Stanislaus. The action is called mobbing, and the smaller birds are defending their nests from predation, or protecting their territory. The small agile birds are generally not in a great deal of danger because of their speed and mobility, not unlike a bunch of small thin cross-country runners playing football against big heavy water polo players.