Enormous, a blue-gray back, white then gray stripes at the end of a rounded tail–and it wasn’t afraid of him like the mourning doves it dwarfed: the young squirrel froze in high alert, then fled in terror.
Doofus, that’s a juvenile band-tailed pigeon, not a Cooper’s hawk.
The band-tailed is closest genetically to the extinct passenger pigeon and so they are using its eggs in experiments to try to bring the other back.
Which leads me to a question: wildlife instinctively knows what other species to be afraid of or not. If an extinct species were to be brought back genetically, would other ones need to relearn how to react to them? Or would that still be hard-wired in even after so many decades’ absence from this planet?
Meantime, back here in the day to day, the washing machine was diagnosed with a failed pump. $180, done. The repairman checked out everything else on the machine and said approvingly that it has “low mileage” and that it’s in great shape now.
No Speed Queen splurge quite yet.