Red tailed hawks - Geese are on the menu.

Red tailed hawk at Munson Pond, Jan 31, 2026.

I walked around Kelowna's Munson Pond yesterday.  I found over a dozen feather piles from the carcasses of dispatched geese or maybe ducks on my walkabout.  Clearly, something was catching and eating the birds.

I saw two red-tailed hawks, one at a distance (photo below) and one that perched atop a nearby tree (above).  I used a APS-C sensor camera with a 1.4x teleconverter and my 500 mm f/5.6 len, which gave me the equivalent of a little over 1000 mm of focal length.  You can see from the detail on the head (right panel) that I was relatively close - in fact the bird almost filled the frame in my viewfinder.

I suspect that the geese may have been too large to haul off to a favoured perch to consume, so it would have been plucked and eaten on the ground.  I did not find much in the way of remains other than feathers, although there was a femur or humerus present that must have been from a goose at one of the sites.  Any skeletal remains were probably scavenged by local creatures such as foxes, coyotes, ravens, magpies, and crows.  The bones were no doubt carried off to a den of some sort to safely be consumed.

A second red tailed hawk on the same walk - light phase.

It has been a very mild winter here; most of the time, it has been just above the 0 mark.  There are a lot of ducks and geese in the area.  Although the pond is frozen over, there is lots of open water around the larger lakes and rivers.  The lack of snow also allows birds the opportunity to eat vegetable matter on the ground.  The hawks have benefited from both facts - lots of food and not too cold.  It's a good thing they don't get tired of eating the same food all the time.

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com