Woman Knocked Out Cold By Aggressive Neighborhood Hawk
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) – Remember that 1963 movie where Alfred Hitchcock in a cameo appearance walks out of a pet shop as Tippi Hedren walks in?
"And when I came up, it just blind-sided me, hit me," said Eileen Bridge.
Bridge has taken to watching the skies ever since Saturday afternoon, when she was dive-bombed by a red-tailed hawk while washing her car. It felt like a baseball bat.
"Knocked me down, I actually fell," she said. Bridge's neighbors actually tell her she appeared to be knocked out cold, possibly unconscious for a time from the bird attack.
She has a beaut of shiner – facial, scalp and ear lacerations. Bridge looks like she's gone a few rounds. Her husband Pat couldn't believe it.
"He said, 'You look like a combat veteran,'" Bridge said. "There was so much blood on my face, dripping down my blouse."
Pat Bridge got the call at work from his shaken wife and took her to the hospital.
A pair of hawks moved into a 2-foot-wide nest in a tall pine behind the Bridges' home on Filmore Road in Forest Hills this spring. The nestlings soon appeared.
Pat Bridge had a close call a few days before Eileen, while crossing the yard.
"From behind, I heard this rushing air and wind sound," he said. "It was that hawk. It just glanced off the top of my head."
And a neighbor had a close encounter over the weekend. Lynn Cassidy saw the hawks circling over her chihuahua and Jack Russell terrier.
"My husband got the dogs in the house and that thing put its wings back and just came straight down," she said. "They're pretty aggressive."
An ornithologist says these hawks may just be particularly grumpy or over-protective parents.
However, because of the attacks, the state game commission is stepping in and the nest will be removed and the babies relocated.
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