A hawk hunting for house pets in the kempt lawns of suburbia sounds like the making of an urban legend, but the tale has, in recent decades, become a staple of local news. In 2011 a hawk plucked two small dogs from their Boston neighborhood and dropped them from the sky, inflicting serious injuries. A different hawk nabbed a Pomeranian from its home in Beech Island, South Carolina back in 2013; the 10-year-old rescue didn’t survive. And then there’s the case of the great horned owl, that in 1995, reportedly feasted on the pets of Greenville, Maine.

Evening news packages follow predictable beats: a red-eyed middle-aged man or woman, the still photograph of their diminutive family pet, and a cool baritone voiceover: "A large hawk had a small dog for lunch — and your pet could be next!"

The National Park System is turning 100, and The Verge is celebrating with Wilderness Week: a look at the natural world, its freaky critters, and its future.

Are we really to believe in a legitimate avian menace skulking above our backyards? Have said backyards become the battleground in the war of domesticity? Should we as pet owners be paralyzed in fear?

No, there isn’t a secret war between birds and pets. But large hawks and owls are predators, and they do, sometimes, attack pets. There are a few things people with small pets — under 20 pounds — can do to take a little extra precaution.

The trouble with avian spook-stories is they’re often exaggerated, speculated, or outright fabricated for maximum drama. For example, let’s return to the insatiable great horned owl of Greenville, Maine. Despite the incident’s comparably minor scope — a few pets abducted by a wild animal in a small town — the story became something of a national sensation.

Incidents are elevated for maximum drama

The Orlando Sentinel made room for an item on the owl hundreds of miles away: "Wildlife officials said the owl, which hunts small prey, may have discovered an easy food supply in Greenville's cat population and eventually lost its fear of being around humans." The image is morbidly funny. It’s also false.

According to a follow-up by the Bangor Daily News, Greenville residents only lost three pets during the reign of the great horned owl, and two of those pets — a pair of vanished house cats — were nabbed without eyewitnesses. Which is to say they may not have been nabbed at all. It’s as if the further the story traveled, the less true it became.

But as is the case with most news, people rarely remember the corrections, and so large hawks and owls have unjustly earned a bad reputation for abducting pets from numerous misreports and rumors. The shift has changed our perception so thoroughly that many people are willing to believe the animals are capable of physics-defying attacks.

A hawk won’t carry your child into the clouds

In 2012, a group of Canadian students tricked a number of local news channels when they uploaded a video of an eagle swooping into a park, grabbing a baby, and arcing upwards into the air, before releasing the infant back to earth. The video is fake, obviously, but more so it’s premise is ludicrous and should be clearly impossible. An eagle, smaller than most large hawks and owls, cannot lift a 30-pound toddler. And yet, from years of stories of malicious birds, people were primed to mistake grim fantasy for reality.

The rise of the hungry hawk in popular culture is likely attributable to its panic-inducing concision: a few words capture an otherwise difficult-to-summarize fear that a surrogate of nature will swoop into our controlled suburban spaces and turn our domesticated housemates into feral snacks.

In the United States a number of hawks and owls are large enough to attack a pet, though most are unlikely or simply unable to carry a dog or cat into the sky with a cartoonish flourish. Great horned owls, northern goshawks, and red-tailed hawks are three of the most common birds-of-prey to lash at small dogs and cats, typically those under 20 pounds.

Be mindful of your own backyard

Birds do attack pets — great horned owls in particular have a reputation for attacking domesticated cats — but there are a number of ways to avoid these confrontations. Oftentimes the answer is as simple as knowing if your yard is also viewed by a hawk or owl as its own home.

Texas A&M’s Veterinary Medicine program encourages, pet owners living closer to rural areas to look for nesting areas, and to stay away. They encourage people to keep their yard "free of debris or plant material that predators can hide in."

Gail Garber is the executive director of Hawks Aloft, an Albuquerque nonprofit focused on conservation of indigenous wild birds and their habitats. The New Mexico town has a population of Cooper’s hawks, which can be fiercely protective of their nests, not just attacking pets, but anything that threatens its territory, including humans. For this reason, Garber recommends that pets under 15 pounds, living in areas with large bird populations should be supervised at all times during outdoor activities.

"We like to recommend people be considerate of the bird," says Garber. "The bird isn’t attacking them for the sake of attacking them. It’s trying to protect its babies from what it views as a threat to its offspring. Give that bird some space."

Don’t tamper with nests

Pet care site Dogster reminds worried pet owners that interfering with nestlings, eggs, or birds of prey can violate state and federal laws. If a hawk or owl nests in your yard, keep pets indoors until the eggs hatch and the babies leave the nest, at which point you may remove the nest.

A flashlight can also be used to shoo owls. And Garber notes that making yourself larger than the bird and shouting at it will intimidate the animal should it prepare to strike. Garber also notes that umbrellas, while not good as a weapon, are a useful way to defend from hawk attacks.

But Garber notes one of the best ways to deal with hawks and owls is to better understand them, to see that they’re not malicious blood-thirsty demons, but part of a larger ecosystem.

"I think a lot of people are afraid of nature," says Garber. "They’re afraid of being anywhere in the wild by themselves. Most people when they go to a national park never go more than a quarter mile form the trailhead."

Rather than fear birds, learn about them

Garber’s program works with underprivileged students in the Albuquerque area to introduce them to local parks. She encourages people to visit their nearby parks, and to not just learn about nature, but to experience it firsthand.

In some ways, the internet and television have the potential to further divide the animals we share our homes with, and those we see as threats. Countless cute GIFs mollify our view of cats and dogs, while the occasional video of a bird snatching its prey can make hawks and owls appear vicious and cruel.

But hawks and owls play an important role in balancing the rodent population, where rodents themselves also serve a function, helping to spread seeds and control parasites. Unfortunately, the complexity of nature doesn’t condense into an evening news item or a web video.

By taking the time to understand nature, we can learn how to live alongside it. Our yards aren’t grocery stores for evil birds, but they are homes for countless creatures, small and large. Instead of being fearful of our neighbors, we must learn to live alongside them.