goshawk eating my chicken 02

goshawk eating my chicken 02

It does look similar to an osprey, but it is as small or smaller than a red tailed hawk. It has a short wing span. It mostly flies in the tree line. It very rarely flies in the open sky. It hunts from a very low perch in a tree, normally around 4-5 feet high, the highest I have seen it perch is 6-8 feet. Its nest is in a pine tree. No call is made when flying or hunting. It hunts once or twice a day, usually 9 in morning and 3 in the afternoon. It mostly eats rabbits but will get a chicken when a hens wanders away from roosters. It does not risk confrontation, even if my small dog runs at it. Color blue in chicken terms, gray in colir. Belly is a lighter blue/gray with spots evenly spaced out like a stripped pattern on it. It has a short black beak with a little yellow spot on the top of it's beak, between the eyes, similar to where a comb would start on a chicken. Darker back feathers. Tail is short and barred-in chicken terms. Eyes look brown on my camera phone. It looks like it is wearing a dark blue mask around its eyes with white eyebrows (above the eyes, coming out from the beak in a v shape across both eyes back across skull, leaving it look like it has a dark blue cap on its head. It will usually snap the neck of it's prey, breaking off the head, leaving it behind and intact. It usually eats from the belly side and leaves behind the intestines and both wings intact on a chicken. It leaves the skeleton where it is. It is eating a young pullet, a juvenile, female chicken, in the video which took 2 days to finish. It killed and started to eat her in the evening and finished her in the morning, where it caught her. It also carries off many rabbits, usually small, young rabbits about 8 to 13 weeks old. It swoops down and carries off rabbits and perches in a tree to eat it. This is a description of the behavior of the goshawk on my land as I have observed, not of all goshawks.