Finally caught this elusive bird on film!
 

The last 2 days we've seen as many as 2 dozen pheasants along a specific stretch of country road. One handsome rooster has a broken tail feather.

Then there was a young Bald Eagle just sitting in the field, waiting for a meal.

Such beautiful birds! I cannot imagine being able to see that right outside your window!

These weren't in the yard unfortunately, but within a few miles. Wish there were pheasants around the house! They are beautiful birds.

They are beautiful. You can really hear them. We have had them come and eat with the chickens.

We had a beautiful hawk sitting in our Hawthorne tree in the back yard this week. He was watching our bird feeder.

Beautiful, mrsD! Nice photo. I believe this is a male Merlin:
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Oh, cool. We have never seen one like this before. Mostly we get the large Goshawks which are light colored. This one was very handsome! We do have lots of mourning doves... that is probably what he was after!

Thanks for ID ing him for me. I have a Sony super zoom digital camera. It is very useful for nature photos. This hawk let me take 4 shots before he decided to leave. Just opening the door often spooks them away, usually. ;)

We have Merlins here in Iowa also. I can tell when they land in a nearby tree because all other birds go POOF!

This fellow flew by our front windows about 15 minutes ago.

He seems to be hanging around here for a while. There are pigeons about 2 blocks from us, and we are on the edge of a small woods...so we have lots of birds. I think he is after the doves. Our kitten Maya does watch out this window quite a bit behind my monitor too...it faces the back yard where the feeder is.

This guy seems quite large flying so close to the house. Same coloring as a sparrow hawk, but much much bigger.

One Christmas when our son was about 8 or so we were having a fancy breakfast and a huge hawk came right outside our dining room window and proceeded to eat a dove! It was rather gross and provoked our son into an eeeeuuuu
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attitude, but we subsequently called the event the Christmas Hawk. And now we have a Christmas Merlin! LOL ;)