City's new pastime: Talon shows

It was just another Center City killing, except it happened in broad daylight and a crowd gathered to watch. An adolescent red-tailed hawk landed on the roof of a black car near Eighth and Market, sank its talons into a pigeon, and proceeded to chow down.

Feathers and entrails flew. Video phones were deployed. Bystanders groaned. The bird, unfazed, kept eating.

Then, having finished its meal, the hawk flew to a nearby lamppost for a postprandial nap, leaving the returning motorist to deal with the bloody pulp and fluff scattered atop the car.

That close encounter with nature - red in tooth and claw, and vividly captured on a YouTube video - was certainly dramatic, but such hawk sightings are no longer rare in Philadelphia.

So many YouTube videos document hawk kills in the city that they practically constitute a genre. Besides recording the mayhem on Market Street, humans have filmed hawks in mid-bite in Rittenhouse Square, on the University of Pennsylvania campus, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art's sculpture garden, and in the yards of Bella Vista rowhouses. One local bystander narrowly missed becoming collateral damage when a large redtail dived for a squirrel outside the museum. The squirrel got away.

One reason for the run-ins with redtails is that raptor populations have made a remarkable comeback in the last five years, and they've done so, ornithologists say, by moving into downtowns. Once a habitué of North America's grasslands, hawks have discovered that cities are safe places to raise a brood, and they offer a 24-hour smorgasbord of pigeons, rats, and squirrels.

"We have a pretty good view of Logan Square, and we see them hunting all the time," said Dan Thomas, who manages the bird collection for the Academy of Natural Sciences. Not long ago, he added, a colleague went to fetch the academy's van from the alley behind the museum only to discover a Cooper's hawk enjoying a pigeon on the roof.

There was a time when a person couldn't get within 10 yards of a hawk kill, said Kevin McGowan, a scientist at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y. That may still be the case in rural areas. But as hawks settle in cities, they've grown more accustomed to people.