Nesting Hawks Encore 2009 - part 1

(Today, the first half of a two-parter on our nesting hawks. We'll put the second half up tomorrow.)

Last year, and again this year, we’ve had the privilege of observing a pair of Sharp-shinned hawks that nest in the big pine that stands in front of the Hawksbill Cabin. This pine is probably 80 feet tall, and about a third of the way up it is split into four or five trunks. The bottom half is all covered with ivy, and the nest is about two thirds of the way up, above the last tangles of the vines. Our perspective from below is such that we can’t quite see the nest, although we can see – and hear – all of the comings and goings.

Just like last year, the hawks have raised a brood of four youngsters, and we’ve been able to watch their development over the course of the spring and early summer. For the last two weeks, the activities have mainly consisted of flying around from tree to tree in the hollow, whistling “scree, scree” from time to time – whether it is a cry of loneliness of hunger we can only guess. It’s clear they are waiting for a parent to arrive with prey, an event that is followed by a flurry of calls and frantic flying to wherever the parent has alighted, since there is a strict “first come, first served” rule in hawk culture.

Due to work deadlines, we weren’t able to come out for a couple of weeks in June this year. At some point while we were away the youngsters took their first flights; so we missed their emergence from the nest and their first clumsy attempts to fly from branch to branch in the big tree, or even better – as they learned to bridge the 30-foot gap between the neighboring pines and oaks with a leap and glide.

Looking back in my notes from last year, it seems to me that this brood is a month ahead of where last year’s batch was at this time – it was just about the time of this post last year that I first wrote the Project FeederWatch program at Cornell to ask for help identifying the birds as we began to see them. On their suggestion, we spent some time learning the difference between the larger Coopers hawk and the Sharp-shinned hawk – scrutinizing everything from the parents’ “kik-kik-kik” call, to the prey (strictly small birds, which is why the we promptly put away our feeders when the hawks arrive), to the distinctive t-shape of the birds in flight (Coopers have more of a cross-shape).

I’ve tried very hard to get a good phone-cam photo of the youngsters, but so far, even after two years of trying, the opportunities just haven’t been there. Next year, if we’re lucky and they come back, I’ll be sure to have a digital camera with a zoom so I can get some better photos; the ones I have published here on the blog are the best of the more than two dozen attempts that I made this summer and last.

Tomorrow's post will describe a couple of events that we've been able to watch during meal times for the youngsters.