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Hawks on the Wing Stephen Bastide Red-tailed Hawks in mating flight. Malden, Mass., Boston skyline in the background. By Gouldingken. High over the city a pair of hawks is circling, riding a thermal rising from the sun-baked buildings and streets. Their cries are primal and unearthly, their flight effortless and elegant. These Red-tails are the king and queen of all that they survey. This is their private territory for hunting, breeding and raising a dynastic brood. They will vigorously defend their domain against usurpers. A third hawk appears to disturb this aerial mating dance. The male dives to drive off the intruder, accelerating to 120 mph, then feints to avoid a possibly fatal mid-air collision. The interloper is no romantic rival, however, but one of their young adult children asking to return home following yet another failure to launch. He endures a little more of dad's tough love until he realizes that the answer is NO, then flaps off to once again try to find his own territory. Hawks are wonderful to watch. They seem to soar effortlessly over the city, both playthings and masters of the wind. They perch in trees, on the pediments and fire escapes of apartment and office buildings, streetlights and telephone poles, or hover on strong winds ... waiting ... patiently watching like a hawk for prey. A rat scurries through the grass in a garden. The hawk jumps up off his perch, silently swoops down in an accelerating power glide, stuns it's quarry with the force of its 1.5 to 3 pounds traveling at up to 120 mph, digs its long sharp talons into the body of its victim and flies off for a leisurely lunch in a nearby treetop. Hawlks, however, have terrible table manners. They perch somewhere high up with their meal, the better to keep an eye out for the next course, tear the prey apart with their powerful hooked beaks and spit the bloody bits that they don't like onto the ground - or whoever's walking down below at the time. This disgusting habit is what got the Red-tailed couple Pale Male and Lola evicted from their nesting site over the entrance to a tony Upper East Side cooperative building in Manhattan. This landed them as causes celebres in the pages of the New York Times and instantly made them world famous celebrities. All because someone - obviously not a nature lover - took exception to picking bleeding rat guts off his handmade suits. Other celebrities and bird lovers, including Mary Tyler Moore, banded together in several passionate protests and eventually the hawks were allowed to return and rebuild their nest. Hawks lead harried lives and are often harassed by other birds, but seldom by humans. In fact, we should welcome them. Besides being inspiring presences, these hungry raptors really keep the rat population down within their hunting territories. Hawks are frequently seen being followed and sniped at by several to a flock of dozens of birds. Mobbing, as this behavior is called, is done by blue jays, crows, grackles, mockingbirds and starlings to drive hawks off the territories they share. It's most often seen in the spring when the birds are nesting and hawks will swoop in to steal a tender nestling or the eggs. Red-tailed Hawk. The Fenway, Boston. Hawks themselves are vigilant defenders of their own nests. In recent years, a couple has nested high up on steel beams supporting the canopy over the infield seats at Fenway Park. Sometimes they'd do flyovers of the field during games, perhaps for a birds-eye view of the action, and get worked into the play-by-play. "He's turning right. Maybe he's a Republican. He's heading left. Could be a Democrat. Now he's flying straight off. Probably an Independent." The Red Sox began removing the hawk's nest each year before opening day in April. But the park is open for tours and events year around. Last spring, one of the hawks swooped down on a girl in a school tour and raked his razor-sharp talons across her scalp. She was taken to the hospital, the nest destroyed and the hawks driven off. Hawks are cool customers, quietly confident in their superior weaponry and fighting skills. I've often been surprised by a Red-tail perched on a fence post or a tree limb only a few feet away. Their talons curl well around a standard 4-inch-wide fencepost. They will often pose quite patiently for pictures, heads swiveling back and forth, the better to keep an eye on you or maybe to present the photographer with a choice of imposing profiles. Red-tailed hawks have a very unearthly, chilling cry - uttered only when on the wing - that must freeze many animals in their tracks. It always gets my attention and I stand quite still to listen to the strange sound. Peterson's (Field Guide to the Birds) describes it like this ... "An asthmatic squeal, keee-r-r (slurring downward)." Well, he's the bird boss, but maybe it's better to recall the sound of a hawk or an eagle screeching in a movie soundtrack, maybe mixed in with other spooky sounds of the wild. That was a Red-tail. And he's still crying out for his residuals. The hawk at the left just above is one of the Red-tailed residents of Boston's Fenway Victory Gardens. Whether this is a male or female, I can't tell. The sexes look alike, although females are 25% larger and heavier. Both are very large birds with broad, wide wingspans of 43" - 57", 19" - 25" stem to stern and weighing between 1.5 - 4.4 lbs. The red in the wide rounded tail of the Red-tailed hawk is all on the upperside of Buteo jamaicensis. The rufous, rusty red feathers are usually seen in flashes when the hawk is swooping low to the ground, either coming in for or coming from a kill, or banking in flight. Underneath the tail is banded with brown stripes. Juveniles have dark gray tails that may lack banding. The breast is snowy white with a broad band of brown streaks across the belly. The topsides and head are brown and the beak is conspicuously curved. If they have you in their sights, their gaze is powerful and penetrating. The Red-tail make their homes and hunt in a wide range of habitats and at many altitudes. They are found in the urban wilds, on farmlands, mountains and deserts, grassland and prarie groves, plains, salt marshes, tropical rain forests and in coniferous, deciduous and mixed woodlands. Basically, everywhere but deep forests, since they need open spaces to spot their prey. Red-tailed hawk with nestlings, 3 weeks old. Braintree, Mass. By Thomas O'Neil, 2004. Red-tails are extremely adaptable to different locales and diets and (partly) as a result are quite variable in appearance and range, with 14 recognized subspecies varying from light to dark shadings. This adaptability has made the Red-tail the most common and widespread hawk in North America. It's populations are still steadily increasing, most notably in urban areas, and it's conservation status is now LC, of least concern, a designation it shares with the Rock Dove (pigeon). whose populations it welcomingly helps to control. Red-tails usually mate for life upon sexual maturity at age two and are monogamous, forming a devoted pair bond and playing doting parents together over many years. Divorce is rare, as with geese, but if a partner dies they will remarry. Pale Male, the famous Manhattan hawk, had three mates prior to his current partner Lola. City living is often hazardous for hawks and other birds. His first mate, dubbed First Love by his large fan club, died after eating a poisoned pigeon in Central Park. He then took up with Blue who mysteriously disappeared and is presumed dead. In late winter or early spring a hawk's fancy turns to love, and lots of it. To get in the mood the male and female will often perform a sweeping and sometimes death-defying aerial courtship dance. These tangos last ten minutes or more, allowing plenty of time to spy. They soar in wide circles high over the city screaming at each other. The male shows off his best stuff by dropping down in steep power dives then shooting back up again at top speed. His bonafides established, he flies over the female and taps her on the shoulder with his talons to signal that the time is right for romance. The pair may then grab each other, lock talons and spiral downward toward the ground. After such stimulating foreplay it's time for some sex in a nearby treetop. Hawks only do quickies, but what their love making lacks in endurance it makes for up in frequency. This is due to the fact that avian sex is extremely awkward. It's the equivalent of copulating doggy-style on a balance beam in a full hoop skirt (that's just a guess, I should add). There's just so much in the way of genital contact and the footing is so shaky. The female perches on a branch and bends over. The male flies in and digs his fingers into her back. She shakes her tail feathers off to one side. A little furtive, athletic frottage takes place for five to ten seconds and it's all over. When they're really hot for one another this can happen many times a day with no foreplay needed and the aerial ballet is omitted. While courting and mating in late winter and early spring, the hawk couple begins constructing a nest or renovating an existing one. Nesting sites can include tall trees, cliff ledges, apartment and office buildings or other man-made structures such as the canopy over the infield seats at Fenway Park. The nest is built from twigs lodged in the branches or crotch of a tree from 15 to 70 feet off the ground or even higher up on the ledge of a tall cliff. Urban nesting sites also include wide window ledges, ornamental stonework, pediments and fire escapes on buildings. Recently a pair nested and raised their chicks in a nest built on top of an air conditioner security enclosure projecting from a window over Houston Street in New York City. The Red-tail nest is a sloppy, loosely woven roundish structure about 3 feet in diameter and up to 3 feet high. To prevent the eggs from being punctured and provide insulation, the nest is lined with soft plant and other materials scavenged from various sources - leaves, pine needles, corn husks, bark, catkins, reeds, grasses and trash. The nests of urban birds frequently have trash woven into or lining them. Brightly colored strips of cellophane is a favorite decorative motif. I've observed Red-tails courting, mating and nest building. I suspect that the nest building I saw was being done by the pair that get evicted from Fenway Park every year before opening day. But maybe they were newcomers, as they did seem to be rather inexperienced home builders. It was early spring, just before opening day, a strong breeze was blowing and they were about 30 feet up in a maple tree. The female did the work while the male perched watchfully close by, surveying the scene below and keeping an eye on the progress. Which wasn't much. The female flew off to the stand of phragmities lining the river bank a hundred feet away and returned with a reed in her hooked beak. She placed the reed on the tree limb ... and it blew away in the brisk breeze. Gone! A look of puzzlement, cocking her head to one side to see where it had gone. She flew off and returned with another reed. The same thing happened! The scene repeated itself many times. Growing bewilderment and frustration, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, until they finally flew off to escape the spell lurking in that treetop. In the middle of this ordeal, the male flew down and perched on a fencepost a few feet away from me giving me a long hawk-like glare, perhaps to see if my presence was jinxing the proceedings. Hawks will reuse the same nest and defend the same breeding grounds for years, but will build a new nest if the previous year's nest is destroyed or expropriated. Great Horned Owls, which are the size of the largest hawks, aren't smart enough to build their own nests, despite the owls' reputation for wisdom, and steal Red-tailed nests months before the hawks are ready to return to them. Owls and hawks compete for resources but generally coexist peacefully, although they will occasionally kill each other's young or destroy the eggs. Hawks are homebodies and the new nest will usually be very close by, often less than a mile away and sometimes just a few hundred yards or less from the old one that the owls have taken over. Coupling completed and the nest built, the female lays a clutch of 2 - 3 eggs (more unusually, 1, 4 or 5). As with most birds clutch size is related to the current feeding conditions - more eggs are laid when food is abundant and fewer in lean times. The eggs are about 2.5-inches long, white or bluish-white and spotted with brown or unmarked. Brooding, or incubating, begins after the first egg is laid rather than when the clutch is complete. This strategy allows the eggs to hatch asynchronously in the order that they they were laid. Incubation habits differ among bird species, but in most hawks both males and females seem to share the brooding duties equally as they do nest building. Almost all birds brood, generally by sitting on their eggs, whose shells are specially designed to bear the weight of the parent's body without breaking, often with some support from the raised side of the nest. When brooding a bird transfers its body heat to the eggs to develop the embryo. Birds are warm blooded animals, of course, with normal temperatures of 104° F (they have to run hotter than us because they're smaller). Some heat is lost in the transfer, so it turns out that the ideal avian incubation temperature is actually around the human norm of 98.6° F. But feathers make the bird, so how is this heat transfer accomplished with all that high R-factor insulation in the way? Just before brooding most birds develop a brood patch, a temporarily featherless area of bare skin lined with swollen blood vessels on the abdomen which will come in contact with the eggs. Hawks, both male and female, have one large patch, other species may have several strategically placed patches. In hawks the patch develops naturally before brooding due to hormonal changes. Other species such as ducks and geese pluck out the feathers to make the patch and use them to line their nests. In addition to brooding, the eggs are turned frequently to assure even development of the embryo. Incubation takes about a month and the eggs hatch out in 30 to 35 days, one after the other following their 'laying order'. Red-tails are born with no means to walk or fly, covered in down, with eyes wide open and must be constantly fed by their parents. Following the lore of falconry, for which Red-tails are often the current raptor of choice, the young before they fledge - fly and leave the nest - are called eyasses. They quickly resemble cute little ruthless, hook-billed killers, which will soon be their instinctual career path. Bird species vary widely in their stage of development at birth. The spectrum spans from the precocial to the altricial. Precocial species are, well, precocious - competent from birth, to various degrees. Altricial young take time to develop competence.     Did you enjoy this article? Tip the creator! Click on the Tipjoy button to the left. Your kind contribution goes directly to our contributor. And you'll both feel the joy. 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