Impressive visitor? No, it's just the food chain.

This winter, we put up bird and squirrel feeders (separate ones) to see what we could attract. We put the feeders about 40 feet from our kitchen windows, so we always have a great view of the show. We saw all the usual suspects: cardinals, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, doves, blue jays, bluebirds, goldfinches, black-capped chickadees, red-belied woodpeckers, and more.

Imagine our surprise one day when we look out our window and see a beatiful red-tailed hawk, perched in the tree not 20 feet away from us. Wow, we think, we're pretty special to get such a majestic encounter like this. We've never seen such an impressive bird up close in the wild, close enough to see the bird's yellow feet and talons.

Wow, we think, what makes us so special that we have such an amazing bird so close. We must be doing something right to be attracting visitors like this. Turns out, that's partly true.

Hawks will often perch and swoop after their prey, which in this case are the doves which scour the ground under our feeders, looking for scattered birdseed. Doves are some of the slower birds we attract and would definitely make the easier prey for the hawk.

We're still impressed with our visitor and look forward to his/her return. However, we won't overly romanticize the next encounter. For this raptor, we're not a beacon, we're a buffet.