Angry bird attacks suburban Pittsburgh woman

PITTSBURGH - It was like a scene from the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock horror classic "The Birds." And a suburban Pittsburgh resident found herself cast in the Tippi Hedren role.

Elaine Bridge told CBS Pittsburgh she has taken to watching the skies ever since Saturday afternoon. She was washing her car when she was dive-bombed by a red-tailed hawk. It felt like she was being struck with a baseball bat.

"It just blindsided me, hit me," she said. "Knocked me down, I actually fell."

She has a black eye along with 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 earlier 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 overprotective parents.

However, because of the attacks, the state Game Commission is stepping in and the nest will be removed and the babies relocated.