There’s something odd going on outside my windows. The area off our kitchen counters, extending all the way around two sides of a room where we eat most of our meals has ten large windows. Seven of those windows face North. In the winter, during the day, those windows tend to reflect the outdoors, and a lot of birds bang into the windows, thinking they are flying toward a grove of trees.
I’ve noticed that we have a lot of hawks visiting this year. We have Cooper’s Hawks and Red-Tailed Hawks in this area, and most likely other varieties that I haven’t identified. Over the past ten years, we’ve had one or two visits a year, but this year, the hawks are regularly chasing the birds at my feeders.
I’m trying to decide if the feeder birds are using the windows to aid in their escape, or whether the hawks are using the reflections to confuse the smaller birds and bring them down.
I haven’t SEEN what’s happening. I’ve just heard it. We’ll hear a bird glance hard off the windows, with a sharp thunk. We’ll look up in time to see the flash of the hawk’s wings, but not in time to see if it was the hawk who hit, or the smaller bird. We haven’t seen a hawk catch a smaller bird, so we can’t decide if the hawks are being bamboozled by the little birds, or if the hawks are driving the little birds into the windows to stun them, to make it easier to catch them.
Has anybody had any experience with this phenomena?

We’ve been in a deep freeze for several days. I woke this morning to hear that it was -7 degrees F. That seemed more bearable when the town clerk from Embarrass, Minnesota confirmed that they had reached -54 degrees F. We’re not talking about wind chill. These were the actual temperatures! Everyone but DH ran their errands and got in out of the weather. We let our vehicles warm up before we drove, and we didn’t go out unless it was absolutely necessary.
That deep freeze may make the next few days seem warm in comparison. We’re supposed to warm up enough to have 1 to 3 inches of snow tonight, again tomorrow night, and then again Friday or Saturday. We are severely behind on our precipitation for the winter, so I’ll take what I can get, and be thankful it’s not three feet of snow at one time!
I’ve started perusing the seed and plant catalogs. It’s only two months to SPRING!!!