Blame for Stillwater home’s broken window falls on hawk

When they drove up to their house earlier this week and saw a dining room window broken, Randy and Hedda Rosen thought their home may have been burglarized.

But when they went into the house, the glass and feathers told them a different story.

“Glass was all over the place and feathers were all over the place,” said Randy Rosen, who lives on Putnam Road in the town of Stillwater.

They found a red-tailed hawk dead on the floor.

“The hawk must have been flying at a high rate of speed,” Randy Rosen said. The impact “sent glass all the way through the dining room into the kitchen,” he said.

Hedda Rosen was the first to arrive home on the evening of April 18. She said her husband arrived in another car a few minutes later.

It took a minute or two before she saw the hawk.; it had red feathers on its tail.

She was concerned about her two cats, who are indoor cats.

But the cats were fine and hadn’t gotten out the window. One cat was downstairs and one cat was hiding upstairs.

Randy Rosen, who works in the IT department at Skidmore College, said the dining room windows are heavy, double-pane windows.

Barbara Loucks, a wildlife research scientist for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said red-tailed hawks are common in the Capital Region. These are the hawks people often see sitting up in trees along the Northway or Thruway looking for prey on the ground.

“They like open areas near woodlands,” Loucks said. The Rosens’ home is set in the woods with a large opening for their property.

One of the Rosens’ cats often sits in the dining room window that was broken. The Rosens thought that possibly the hawk was after the small gray cat.

But Loucks said that is unlikely because cats are not usually prey for hawks. She said the hawk was probably flying after something else, possibly a small bird, and thought the window was an open area until it was too late.

The Rosens are convinced that what went through their window was a red-tailed hawk, but Loucks said it could also be a Cooper’s hawk, which is somewhat smaller than a red-tailed hawk but with similar coloring.

An adult red-tailed hawk is between 19 inches and 25 inches tall, head to tail, and has a wing span between 43 inches and 52 inches.

A Cooper’s hawk is between 14 inches and 20 inches head to trail and has a wing span of between 28 inches and 34 inches, Loucks said.

“This time of the year, any hawk should be full-grown,” Loucks said. She said that red-tailed hawks don’t have the distinctive red tail when they are immature but are still quite large, almost as large as a mature red-tailed hawk.

This wasn’t the Rosens’ first hawk experience. Randy Rosen said that about five years ago a hawk crashed through the Rosens’ screened-in back porch but was able to free itself and fly away.

Just a few months ago, Rosen said he was driving on Fitch Road not far from Saratoga Lake when he spotted a large bird flying low and getting closer to the car.

“The we heard a loud slam,” he said. A barn owl had hit the side of his car but after staying on the road a minute was able to fly away.

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