Forget the gators, watch out for the hawks

Carol Olsen never saw it coming, swooping down from above with enough force to knock her to the ground.

She’s among a growing number of passers-by — at least a half-dozen at last count — who have come head to talon in the past week with Cooper’s hawks nesting in a fig tree at the corner of Broad Avenue South and Sixth Street in Old Naples.

The aggressive predator has put an edge on the quiet, leafy neighborhood of low-rise condominiums, three blocks from the elegant Third Street South shopping district.

Olsen, 66, was fiddling with her camera to get a picture of one of the hawks when it sprang, scratching her forehead in three places, plucking her sunglasses from the top of her head and whisking them to the nest in the top of the tree.

“They’re $500 prescription sunglasses, and I have to get them back,” Olsen said.

She intends to retrieve them after the birds have left the nest. For now, she wants to be sure people stay away, for their own sake — and for the birds’, two adult hawks protecting at least one fledgling almost the same size as its parents.

“They’re just doing what comes naturally,” said Olsen, who lives in the Ixora Court building, where the hawks are nesting.

City Hall has posted warning signs on barricades straddling sidewalks that run nearest the nest along Broad and Sixth.

Naples Natural Resources Manager Mike Bauer said the barricades might stay up for another three weeks or so. The nesting season is ending soon.

Olsen, a certified Florida naturalist, said the birds began building a nest in April. She watched as the birds would break off dead twigs from the limbs of nearby trees.

The hawks must like the neighborhood. Olsen said they nested in another tree on the same block last year, something that doesn’t surprise local bird biologist Ted Below.

Below said the birds might be refugees from other parts of the county where growth has pushed them out.

“The more habitat we destroy, the more they have to find good trees and habitat in town,” Below said.

Olsen, a volunteer at the Naples Preserve south of Coastland Center mall, said newcomer Cooper’s hawks have taken up residence there this spring, too.

The medium-size hawks feed mostly on small birds. Their rounded wings and longish tail gives them speed and agility to track down their prey.

“They have good pickin’s here,” Olsen said.

Nobody has to tell Cris Stoneburner about the hawks’ credentials as predators. He became the prey early Wednesday morning as he jogged down the middle of Sixth Avenue.

Stoneburner, 52, said the bird attacked him from behind as he approached Broad Avenue, flew up into a tree and then came at him again.

“I hurried up and got out there a little quicker than normal,” he said. “Needless to say, I was watching my back for the next couple blocks.”

The cut the bird left on Stoneburner’s head was worrisome enough to prompt a trip to the doctor for a look and to make sure his tetanus shot was up-to-date, Stoneburner said.

He still worries, though, that others might not be so lucky. He wants City Hall to post bigger warning signs.

Ixora Court resident John Tobin, who also has been knocked to the ground by the dive-bombing birds, said he is worried that someone might be seriously injured.

It won’t be him, he said.

“I’m always looking up in the air,” Tobin, 65, said with a laugh. “I’m never just looking straight ahead.”

Looking skyward from beneath the nest tree on a late afternoon this week, Olsen noticed a pair of doves fluttering off into the distance.

“Keep going!” she called after them. “Keep going if you want to live!”