Hawk attack!

About a half hour after the last post, I looked out the back window and saw a large wing rise and fall on the other side of my smaller coop (you can see straight through the wire). It wasn't normal behavior and I soon realized a hawk had a chicken down. I ran out, calling to Diane. As soon as I was in the back yard, the hawk rose and settled in a tree just over the ditch on the edge of the yard.

To my surprise, this hawk had attacked a white Delaware rooster. The bird is fine, but his head is bloodied. The rest of the chickens were huddled in the corner of a stall, inside the stable. The hawk went farther away and perched in a tree, another hawk showed up minutes later and perched in another nearby tree. I fetched my telescope from the attic and managed to get a look at the bird, but its back was to me and I couldn't identify the species. I hadn't seen any predatory birds for several days and figured the chickens would be okay since I'm spending the day at home, but if I hadn't looked out by chance,  that rooster would be a goner. So the book is wrong, hawks will attack full-grown chickens. Again, I'm unsure if the first attacker was hawk or eagle, but now I'm back to guessing hawk.

I'm off for the holidays, so I'm leaving the telescope focused on the "sentinel tree," the preferred vantage point of the hawks, since there's a clear view of the coop.

Reminds me of the old Foghorn Leghorn cartoons where Foghorn would always get the the little chicken hawk to attack the barnyard dawg instead of him. Anybody remember that little hawk's name?