Year-end Red-tail

 Imitating a griffon 

Just before lunchtime, a visitor stopped by with a Red-tailed Hawk in a birdcage.  He'd passed the bird sitting on the side of the road, drove home to get a cage, drove back, caught the bird (!) getting only a few scratches on his hands in the process, and placed the bird into the cage.  He's a braver man than I!  The visitor reported that the bird flew about 25 feet when he initially approached it, but it didn't fly a second time, allowing him to effect the capture.

Though we don't rehabilitate injured animals, we still get a fair number of people dropping by asking us to take care of the injured or orphaned wildlife they've brought us.  If we can't get the visitor to take the injured animal to one of two rehab centers (each about a half-hour's drive away) him/herself, one of the staff members or I will grudgingly take the animal.

We got lucky today.  We called Victor Calozza of SkyKing Raptors who has done educational raptor shows for us in the past.  He said that he wasn't busy and would take the bird to one of the rehab facilities, sparing our staff (or me) an hour's drive.  Victor declared the bird to be an adult female Red-tail, and his cursory examination in our kitchen suggested to him that the bird might have a broken wing.

A little mid-day excitement! 

Early Autumn Hawk Walk and Hot-Air Balloon Ride

Busy weekend, this last.  Nevertheless, we found time to enjoy a four-mile walk in the county park downstream of my natural area on Saturday and, on Sunday, we attended the natural area preserve's biannual President's Circle Gala event on an absolutely perfect afternoon on the highest hill in the natural area.

We often take long walks on the weekend--rambles of four to six miles--but Kali's Lyme disease has re-surged and the accompanying aches, pains, and weakness have limited our strolls to four miles or less for the last few weeks.  During this Saturday's walk, a Red-tailed Hawk swooped low over the trail and then perched in a tree fifty feet away.  There, despite being pestered by a Blue Jay, it sat calmly preening and allowing me to take multiple photographs with my point-and-shoot Nikon S10.

Further down the trail, we got a tantalizing glimpse of the creek, still low from the summer's long drought despite several sizable recent rain events.

Sunday's affair, the President's Circle Gala, is held every other year to thank my natural area's most generous supporters.  The event is traditionally held at the crest of a knoll at the highest point in the natural area--an area that had been a private farm but which the natural area purchased 13 years ago and whose managers have converted mostly to native, warm-season grasses to attract meadow-nesting birds like Bobolinks, Grasshopper Sparrows and Eastern Meadowlarks.  With breeding season over, erecting a tent and hosting 150 folks who provide the lion's share of the preserve's support seems like a pretty good alternate use of a small portion of the fields.  (The majority of the fields are left undisturbed to provide shelter and habitat for overwintering birds.)

In the past, Gala attendees were treated to aerial views of the 800-acre preserve from a helicopter, but this year, the preserve's managers opted for tethered hot-air balloon rides.  Even though the day was absolutely perfect for a tented picnic (cloudless skies, low humidity, and temperatures in the low 70s), the knoll was too breezy for the balloon to ascend to more than 20 feet, limiting the views.  Nevertheless, it provided a festive backdrop to an afternoon of smooth jazz, catered food, and lots of mingling and reconnecting with old friends.

A Novel Hunting Technique

Immature Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) hunting on the ground

Last evening, after we both got home from work, we went for a walk at our favorite natural area. Rounding a bend and entering a field, a hawk swooped down out of a tree and onto the ground. I thought that it had caught prey, but the hawk didn't take off again immediately.
Instead, it stayed on the ground for about five minutes, walking and hopping around in the matted grasses. I suspect that it was trying to catch mice or voles that it could hear scurrying in the vegetation but couldn't quite see.
It probably would have remained there longer, continuing the same behavior, except that other walkers approached from the opposite direction. The hawk stayed on the ground for several minutes even while the other walkers looked on, but either it finally got spooked or was unsuccessful in its pursuits and it took off and perched in a tree far across the field.
Further into our walk, along the creek that flows through the preserve, we came upon a fly fisherman trying his luck as the sun was going down. While the stream is too warm to support a self-sustaining trout fishery, the local chapter of Trout Unlimited stocks the creek each year with non-native Brown Trout (Salmo trutta), and some of the fish actually seem to persist in the creek year-to-year despite its warmth and generally urban character.

Red-tailed Hawk Relishes a Catch

A friend of mine who is a good nature photographer usually lugs around a top-of-the-line Nikon photographic outfit during his walks in the natural area we both frequent. This Christmas, he purchased a new Canon S90 pocket camera and seems to have abandoned his Nikon albatross. In any case, he was making images of the native grasslands in the natural area (before the grasslands were buried under the two feet of snow we have blanketing the ground now) when he came across a Red-tailed Hawk with a fresh catch.
The handsome bird must have been really hungry, because my friend reported that it did not take flight upon realizing that a human was approaching. Instead, it rather nonchalantly allowed him to get close enough to get these images while it enjoyed its meal.