In this video, Frogger, a pet red-shouldered hawk in Carson City, Nevada, tries to attack the images of prey in a small game hunting regulations guide. He packs and scratches at it, not realizing the birds and animals aren’t real.
This totally reminds me of something I witnessed in the mid-1990s. Those days I lived on the third story of an apartment building across from Oakland’s Lake Merritt with my then-boyfriend, a biologist. He had a lizard named Mr. Businessman Socks who was housed inside a glass cage. That long rectangular glass box was seated directly in front of our livingroom’s big, curtainless window.
That window was nearly on level with the top of the telephone poles on our street. We would often see the neighborhood’s Cooper hawks tearing apart smaller birds on the top of those poles, with all the tiny feathers floating slowly to the ground.
One Sunday morning, I was reading the paper and heard some commotion. I looked up to see one of the hawks had flown directly over to the ledge of that window. His wings were spread out completely as if he were about to attack. Mr. Businessman Socks was FREAKING OUT, puffing himself up and running around like mad. He clearly thought he was a goner. The large meaty hawk looked at the lizard and then looked at me. There was a long pause and then it flew away, knowing it had been defeated.
This was before cell phones so, saldy, I have no photographic evidence to share with you. I’ll tell you though, that incident is permanently burned into my memory.