As I was driving home from work one day last week, I caught a glimpse of movement above a group of white pine trees growing near the road.

A small raptor – I’m guessing it was a sharp-shinned hawk – shot straight up from within one of the trees. The power and speed the bird exhibited was impressive, and I thought at first it was going after a few crows flying toward it. Instead, it banked and headed in the opposite direction, with the crows in hot pursuit.

Although this fierce raptor preys primarily on birds, the crows were in little danger from it. The mainstays of this hawk’s diet are small songbirds; plus, it had lost its element of surprise. The crows had the upper hand now and took off after the hawk, mobbing it.

As the traffic light turned green, I watched the birds disappear into the distance. The most likely scenario would involve the crows chasing the hawk until it was well out of their territory.

Many birds engage in this mobbing behavior, but crows – and their relatives in the corvid family – are the masters of it. Although ornithologists do not fully understand this behavior, they think the primary reason for it is to call attention to a predator. This removes the predator’s element of surprise and will often cause it to move elsewhere to escape the commotion and attention.

I imagine the hawk eventually outdistanced the crows and found a secluded perch from which to hunt.

Throughout the winter I had spotted birds of prey every once in awhile, so some do winter here in certain parts of the state. Sharp-shinned hawks may winter along coastal Maine; certain populations may travel farther south to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern states, and even as far as Mexico and Central America.

Sharp-shinned hawks – along with other birds of prey – have the dubious distinction of being persecuted for their proclivity to hunt songbirds. In the “Birds of North America” species account, authors Keith Bildstein and Ken Meyer recount early 20th-century reports of thousands of these birds being shot by “armies of men gathered along traditional migration corridors and bottlenecks.”

Even ornithologists of the time described them as “vicious bird killers,” according to the BNA.

Thankfully, this way of thinking has been largely abandoned as we have become more educated about each species’ role in nature. Still, today it must be no less upsetting, for some, to see this hawk swoop in to capture a bird at a backyard feeding station.

Raptors don’t often get an easy meal, though, and in view of the Biodiversity Research Institute’s recently released report on environmental contaminants found in birds, survival may be getting a whole lot harder.

We’ve come a long way from those “armies of men” who gunned down thousands of raptors in the false belief that they were harmful to songbird populations, but we have an even farther distance to cover when we consider the awful scope of environmental contamination.

bdnsports@bangordailynews.net