Just weeks after a hawk snatched away Hollywood star Shanna Moakler’s dog in Southern California, another hawk dropped a puppy nearly straight into the arms of a small boy in central California.
Elaine Bouschard heard her grandson, 7-year-old Taylor Callaway, call out when he first spotted the puppy in her Los Banos garden two weeks ago.
“Right here is where Taylor started yelling that he saw the puppy,” Bouschard told reporters while being interviewed in her backyard.
“All of a sudden I saw this little puppy laying there. He was almost dead,” Callaway said, as reported by KSEE-TV.
“I looked up and the hawk was just flying right here, circling around,” Bouschard told reporters. “At that point, we all just went to the puppy.”
It was a brown-and-white male of indeterminate species, and so young — probably 2 weeks old at most — that its eyes were yet to open. Los Banos is located on semirural agricultural land; the nearby San Joaquin River and San Luis National Wildlife Refuge present perfect hawk habitats. Bouschard speculated that the bird might have seized the dog from a junkyard, because its fur was slick with dirty grease.
She also pointed out wounds on the puppy’s flank. “If you look here, there’s three little clutch marks, right here, and when he hit the ground he bounced.”
Already the owner of several dogs, cats, horses, and even birds of prey, Bouschard proposed a possible scenario:
“He is so wiggly … he’s a bulldozer. I could see him wiggling right out of the talons” of the hawk. But maybe a higher power had a hand in this. “I actually think God just dropped me a baby to have for Mother’s Day, so this is my baby for Mother’s Day,” Bouschard laughingly told reporters. “How cool is this? Pennies from heaven. Puppies from heaven.”
“The dog was taken to a veterinarian to get all of its wounds patched up and is now a happy part of the family,” according to the New York Daily News.
Given the puppy’s provenance, Bouschard has named him TJ Heavenly.
“My thought is that when God drops a puppy from the sky, you keep it,” she said.
