Syracuse.com - Syracuse University basketball writer's family experiences an uninvited Cooper's hawk in basement

[HuntingNY-News]

"I looked down at the floor and there was this big bird just staring at me," Robin Waters said. " practically knocked my son over running up the stairs."

Staff writer Mike Waters, who covers Syracuse University basketball, told me this week about a hawk that crashed through a cellar window in his house in Camillus. His wife, Robin, and their two children, Christopher and Anna Kate, were home at the time.

They had just finished dinner, Robin Waters said, when they heard a bang and the sound of broken glass. She said she originally thought a box must have fallen off a shelf.

Going into the basement with her son, Christopher, she discovered the bottom half of a window was smashed.

“I looked down at the floor and there was this big bird just staring at me,” she said. “I practically knocked my son over running up the stairs.”

She called her cousin’s husband, Nick DeSantis, an avid hunter outdoorsman. He came over and went downstairs with a blanket in one hand and a net in the other. He found the bird, a Cooper’s hawk, sitting quietly on the handlebars of a bike.

As DeSantis got close, Waters said, the hawk suddenly flew around and slammed again into the window, breaking more glass. Undaunted, it circled around one more time and flew again at the window, this time escaping.

“It just left. No blood. Nothing. I even checked the grass outside,” she said. “I got nervous. It must been chasing something. What was he going after?”

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog