Don’t-miss video: Squirrel pwns hawk

February 19, 2014 • 2:32 pm

I don’t know how the cinematographers got this footage (much of it must be a montage), nor do I know how to embed it in a way that will show you the video as you’re about to see it, but it’s pretty amazing footage.  A hawk goes after a wily squirrel, but (to my relief), the squirrel escapes. This video gets The Professor Ceiling Cat Seal of Approval.

Click here.

No squirrels were harmed in the making of this film!

p.s. Don’t bother telling me that the hawk goes hungry, or that you want to kill squirrels, or that you find squirrels delicious.

h/t: Moto via Hempenstein

49 thoughts on “Don’t-miss video: Squirrel pwns hawk”

  1. I’m not sure that you actually need this advice but by clicking on the lower left Youtube logo, you’re redirected to the actual Youtube video, embeddable:

    youtube.com/watch?v=XBEyCr5AoIs

    🙂

  3. It won’t play for me.

      Frank Bartell Assoc. Prof. Anthropology Chair Dept. Of Social Science Community College of Phila. 1700 Spring Garden St. Phila., PA 19130

    >________________________________ > From: Why Evolution Is True >To: fbartell@yahoo.com >Sent: Wednesday, February 19, 2014 4:32 PM >Subject: [New post] Don’t-miss video: Squirrel pwns hawk > > > > WordPress.com >whyevolutionistrue posted: “I don’t know how I got this footage, nor do I know how to embed it in a way that will show you the video as you’re about to see it, but it’s pretty amazing footage.  A hawk goes after a wily squirrel, but (to my relief), the squirrel escapes. This video g” >

  4. Carnivores are among my favorite creatures, and yet I always cheer when their food gets away.

    It is an uncomfortable tension. Love squirrels, mice, chipmunks, etc., but what else do hawks and cats eat?

    Ah nature, red in claw etc. etc.

    3. Yeah, I’m also never sure who to root for, either. If the hawk catches the squirrel, the squirrel dies a quick but gruesome death. If the squirrel gets away, the hawk, and possibly its really cute chicks, dies a slow and gruesome death of starvation.

      What it does show is that the only thing that excuses the various creator gods of their horrific crimes in implementing the design of the universe…is their nonexistence.

      b&

      1. If only there hadn’t been the fall, we wouldn’t have to decide who to roof for because all animals would be vegetarians.

          2. I would assume that agriculture postdated the fall, so cabbages would not have been a concern… but maybe this is why we have no more rhyniophytes, pteridospermatophytes, lepidodendrons, etc. And what a better world it would be with these still in it! 🙂

    4. I like hawks but don’t mind if the occasional prey gets away. If they’re good another meal is usually in the offing.

      1. Beautiful movie! Our daughter (who we were staying with a couple of years ago) had bought the DVD for her four-year-old, but of course it isn’t a kids’ movie (any more than Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Cool World). I loved the mariachi band (‘he is going to die’) and the pop culture references. And every frame is visually beautiful.

        I ended up watching it several times; but unfortunately but predictably the four-year-old preferred dreck like ‘the bee movie’, which will cause me to chew my fingernails clean off if I ever have to endure it again.

      1. Yeah I was thinking that.

        How do we KNOW that the squirrel escaped? For all we know even if it is the same squirrel throughout (debatable), they simply edited some bits of live squirrel at the end to go in place of the footage of the squirrel being nommed.

        As JAC correctly observed “much of it must be a montage”.

  7. I wonder if that squirrel’s name was Peri?

    From what I learned in a film class many years ago, they went through quite a number “Peri”s in filming a scene in which Peri was supposed to barely escape a marten.

  13. Cool. The urban squirrels of Manhattan occasionally get taken by redtails: in Stuyvesant Town on the lowerish East Side I saw a grey get taken by a hawk which then stood there panting over it while a crowd of black and grey squirrels hung from the nearby trees shrieking and scolding at it. Seeing as there are few or maybe no, other predators around it must come as a shock to sophisticated urban Manhattanite squirrels to be visited by death from above like that, poor buggers.

  14. What magnificent editing and cinematography! That film-maker should get an award. The whole thing was just beautiful. Thanks for this.

  16. I’m a bit late with this,but the juxtaposition of hawk and squirrel has caused me to remember some stories I read when I was six years old and had just joined the library.The main character was Sammy Jay, other characters were Chatterer the red squirrel, Red Tail the hawk and Rough Leg the hawk. I had worked out that the stories had to be from North America since I knew that red tailed hawks were not a British species and marvelled that they had red squirrels over there.The stories were (if memory serves) attributed to one “Old Mother West Wind”-can anyone offer any corroboration,please?

    1. Old Mother West Wind — series of books by Thornton W. Burgess.

      I still have “The Burgess Animal Book for Children.” There the narrator was Mother Nature, giving a series of lessons to a couple of curious small animals. The book was my father’s, given to him in 1929. Printed on cheap, poor-quality paper, the book would probably have fallen apart by now even if I had not read it repeatedly. It helped shape me into the professional biologist I am today.

      Professional botanist, hence seriously underfunded — loved “Mike in Barcelona’s” comment.

  17. Fun video. Thanks.
    What’s the current reasoning on flight development as far as predators vs. prey? I had always assumed that it developed as a means of escape, but now I realize that’s unfounded. The only two cases of proto-flight I can think of are squirrels and fish, and both of those seem to stem from escape strategies. Does anyone know?

  18. That was a falconer’s bird. No jesses but in need of a beak trim. I was obviously an experienced squirrel hawk, many don’t learn the nest pounce maneuver. No predator is 100% successful, but there’s no doubt that hawk has caught many squirrels.

  19. Am I the only one to see two irrelevant comments at the end of this thread, from js and phht. Both are out of time order, remaining at the end of the thread.

      1. I saw them last night and they’re still there. They look like trolls, but without knowing what they were replying to, one can’t be sure.

  20. I want someone to explain how this film was made. Much editing, but I wonder if it is multiple squirrels and/or hawks on multiple days. (Although the weather seems to be consistent with a single day.)

  21. I think it might be a recent BBC program called ‘small worlds’ or something like that. There was one with an elephant shrew too.
    They go into the making of at the end.

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