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Fair warning to the squawking, trash-scavenging, car-splattering hordes along Austin Avenue: Tiberius is watching.

Tiberius is a Harris’s hawk with a fearsome hooked beak and talons, and if he can’t eat all the grackles in downtown Waco, his handlers say he can strike terror in their little avian hearts.

Mark Smith of Blackjack Bird Abatement has been taking Tiberius on his night patrols downtown last week as part of a contract with the city of Waco to move the nuisance birds away.

“What normally happens is that he will fly straight up into a tree, then I’ll take off walking down the street, and he’ll fly from tree to tree,” Smith said last week near City Hall as Tiberius perched on his leather glove.

“All the grackles know, ‘I’ve got a hawk after me.’ If one gets caught, the whole roost know about it, and it sends them all into a panic. Luckily, we don’t have to take out too many of them. Just his presence is enough.”

Since 2013, the Fort Worth firm has had a seasonal contract with the city parks and recreation department to control bird populations from October to May. The cost is $1,750 per month.