Nesting Hawks Encore 2009 - part 2

(Today, finishing the two-parter started yesterday, about the little nest of Sharp-shinned hawks that has become an annual event at the Hawksbill Cabin.)

I mentioned this feeding ritual that the hawks have, so I’ll offer a few more details of what we’ve been seeing. Starting around daylight, the youngsters begin making their cries and flying around the neighborhood. This activity continues throughout the morning, before they settle down during the heat of the afternoon. Sometimes, just before we get up, there is a chorus of cries and the sound of a congregation in one of the trees, which we’ve begun to recognize as feeding time.

It seems that this gathering takes place in random trees. My guess is that this is how the adults teach the young to hunt. The young are never very far away, but they are scattered around the hollow, so the lucky first and second are never the same birds. The randomness of it all must be how everybody gets enough to eat; as a result, the flying also gets stronger and more confident by the day.

One morning last weekend was the first time I was able to watch this spectacle in detail. The parent arrived, clutching prey, and left it on a low branch in one of the nearby pines. The fledglings all converged, swarming the meal, dividing it up. After a moment, there was still enough left to incite some jealousy, so more scrambling ensued. Somebody lost their grip on the prize, and the largest portion of it crashed to the ground in a weedy patch of the yard.

None of them went after it after it fell, and I hadn’t had enough coffee to be so adventurous, so I figured that some lucky raccoon would eventually get it. Later in the day, I was walking around the yard and saw two of the young birds down on the ground. They were both covering whatever they had with their wings, obviously eating something. It might have been the lost meal, or maybe another one. In any case, one of the birds had a larger piece, because the second finished up sooner and started running around on the ground in a circle.

Then, on Sunday afternoon, as we were getting ready to leave, the prey was brought back to the home tree. The prey was fetched up into the higher branches this time. It seemed like all of the birds got back in time to get something to eat. After a few minutes, I saw one of the fledglings miss a step and fall off the high branch, down into the area where the trunk splits and the ivy is entwined. I heard the “thunk” of impact and all was quiet.

I sat with my fingers crossed that we hadn’t lost one of the birds. It reminded me of a time a few years ago, when a young finch flew into one of the windows in Alexandria. My wife Mary called animal control, where she was told to just keep an eye on it and protect it from predators – birds don’t usually die from this, they are simply stunned and more likely die because they are attacked during the moment of their vulnerability. So I hoped that all we had in this case was a stunned hawk.

Sure enough, about a half hour later, the little one thrashed its way out onto a branch. Still weak and disoriented, it hopped from limb to limb, always descending. Eventually, it fell to the ground, lying very still – so I thought it had died. Then, a flutter – and then, it righted itself, eventually recovering enough to hop around the yard. And that’s how we left it when we got on the road back to Alexandria.

I was expecting that we’d only be watching three youngsters after that, but early last Friday morning, I saw all four of the youngsters perched separately in the trees around the yard – the injured one had survived. Each one of them is flying proficiently now, including the one that was injured, although this one does seem to favor one leg when it is perched on a branch, and I’ve even seen it lie prone on a branch to rest.

It probably won’t be long now until we don’t see any of the young hawks anymore. They had flown off by the beginning of August last year, and I estimate that in terms of development, this brood is a month ahead of last year’s. So maybe next week, we’ll only have one or two left, and soon after, everyone will be on their way. After that, we’ll probably only catch random sightings of one of them hunting in the woods behind the house.

We’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment out of this natural show, and can only look forward to next year – with hope, that the hawks will return.