Following a home delivery hiatus due to hawk attacks, mail carriers in a southeast Alberta, Canada neighborhood are back on the job.
Following a home delivery hiatus due to hawk attacks, mail carriers in a southeast Alberta, Canada neighborhood are back on the job.
To shield himself from harm, postal delivery person Rick Tobin has taken to carrying a tennis racket.
He armed himself with a baseball bat the day before, but residents didn’t care for the look.
Tobin said he’s also picked up some basic survival skills like learning to watch the ground for the circling hawks’ shadows.
Late summer is when the baby hawks learn to fly and their parents get a bit overprotective.
They start diving at people from behind, - and in 2010 struck a postal worker so hard their protective helmet broke.
A few weeks ago a mail carrier was attacked and injured as well.
For the third year in a row the door-to-door delivery service in Lake Bonavista has had to be interrupted because of the birds.
The birds are expected to migrate south in a few weeks, but until then mailmen are travelling in pairs – one to drop off the mail and the other to serve as a lookout.
