MEXICO — While catching some sun and watching birds under his friend’s feeders on Tuesday, Mark Gaudet got the thrill of his life.

He believes he saw a peregrine falcon dive on a robin near where he sat on a picnic table in the yard of his friend, Steven Santos, at 43 Osgood Ave.

“It was intense,” Gaudet, 46, said.

“That poor little robin, he was making some noise. You could hear the panic in his voice and the other one, he was silent. He was right on him like a fighter pilot chasing another plane.”

He said there were about 50 small birds feeding on the ground ahead of the picnic table under a couple of bird feeders and the robin had its back to the falcon, which was in a beech tree.

When the falcon dove, the small birds suddenly scattered, inducing the robin to flight.

The robin made a beeline for a thick border of cedars along the Santos property line.

“He took off after that robin like a son of a gun,” Gaudet said. “He could fly. He had those talons out and he was going right at him.”

“That robin must have been scared to death, because he was going to be a meal if he didn’t make the right decision. It was intense. You got that intense feeling when you were just watching the whole thing happen.”

Gaudet said the robin plunged into the thick cedar foliage and the falcon swerved away, soaring over the Swift River, which is just down over a tree-lined bank, to land in a maple tree.

“Seeing the falcon, it shocked me,” Gaudet said. “I was hollering at Steve, Steve, Steve, Get out here! I don’t want to be the only one to see this thing!’”

Santos, who was doing remodeling work on his house, came out and looked at the raptor while Gaudet viewed it through binoculars.

Santos said he wasn’t 100 percent sure it was a peregrine, but Gaudet said the raptor stayed in the tree for a good five minutes, enough to get a good look at it. Then it flew over the river toward Rumford and circled back around heading for what Gaudet called the Mexico Ledges across the way from Osgood Avenue.

Gaudet said he checked Google images for hawks and falcons, spotted an image of a peregrine and said that was it.

From beak to tail, the raptor was 16 to 20 inches long and had a wingspan of 24 to 30 inches, with a buff upper chest, Gaudet said.

“He had nice markings on his chest, a whitish goldish with little black specks in it and kind of a grayish complexion to his feathers,” he said.

Paul McGuire of Farmington, the former president of the Western Maine Audubon Society, said that based on Gaudet’s description, the raptor could have been either a peregrine or a Cooper’s hawk.

“A Cooper’s hawk is the same size and every now and then, it will go after a blue jay,” McGuire said.

If indeed it was a peregrine, which are rare and endangered in Maine, McGuire said that would be spectacular.

“He may be onto something,” he said.

Gaudet said he can remember when he was 10 or 12 years old that there was a nesting pair of peregrines on the Mexico Ledges, because the ledges were blocked off and people were told to stay away from there due to peregrines. He said his mother recalls this as well.

Gaudet said he’s seen plenty of bald eagles in the area, including a nesting pair that he watched last year from his mother’s porch near Black Bridge that fished suckers out of the Swift River for their young.

“So I figure maybe with the re-emergence of the eagle coming back here, it wouldn’t be too unusual with the type of weather we’re having to maybe get some falcons back here,” Gaudet said. “It would be nice to see them return to the valley.”

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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