Category Archives: Birds of Prey

Re-nesting

March 16, 2009Birds of Prey, Nesting & CourtshipKate St. John

What do you do when a baby bird falls from the nest? You – or the bird rescuers – put it back in the nest of course.

But what if the nest is too high to reach or it blew out of the tree? The bird rescuers have an elegant solution. It’s called re-nesting.

Pictured here is a baby great-horned owl re-nested by Tri-State Bird Rescue of Newark, Delaware. My friend Kim Steininger volunteers for them as a transporter and raptor re-nester. She sent me her photo of a re-nested great-horned owl and told me how it’s done.

When a raptor nestling is displaced, time is of the essence. Many birds imprint on their caregivers. If those caregivers are their parents, the babies learn how to communicate with their own species, what to eat and how to hunt. If they imprint on humans, they never learn how to be a bird and die of starvation in the wild. So it’s important to return a nestling to its parents very quickly.

As soon as a displaced nestling is reported to TSBR they make sure of the location of its original nest. After examining the bird to confirm it’s in good physical condition, the rescue team goes into action. Using bungie cords and a wicker basket, they secure the basket in a tree as close as possible to the original nest. They line the basket with pine needles, then put the baby in a cloth bag and carefully raise it to the basket using a long rope as a pulley. The baby is gently placed in its substitute nest. Then everyone leaves the area, hoping the parents will find it and care for it.

If the area is left undisturbed, this usually doesn’t take long. The wicker basket doesn’t matter to the parents. Their baby does. Kim tells me that last week her team re-nested a baby great-horned owl whose parents were so thrilled that they hooted a long duet.

The parents bring food to the baby in the basket and climb in the basket to shelter their nestling from the cold. In cases where there are still babies in the original nest the parents divide their duties, one parent staying with the original nest, the other with the wicker basket.

In the end the baby grows up and walks the nest edge on its way to fledging. You can see how they do this if you click on the picture.

Tri-State Bird Rescue cares for birds in Delaware, southeastern Pennsylvania, southwestern New Jersey and eastern Maryland. If you find an injured or displaced bird in that area, call TSBR at 302-737-9543. If you’re in the Pittsburgh area, call the Animal Rescue League Wildlife Center at 412-793-6900.

(all photos by Kim Steininger)

Conspicuous

March 5, 2009Bird Behavior, Birds of Prey, Nesting & CourtshipKate St. John

For months the crows have been loud and obnoxious while red-tailed hawks have been present but not particularly noticeable. This month they switch roles because it’s courtship time.

Birds’ courtship rituals often exaggerate what the species does best. To attract a mate, some species sing or dance, others display their feathers. Birds of prey show off their flight skills.

That’s why we’re seeing a lot of red-tailed hawks lately. In winter they don’t care to be noticed but now they’re conspicuous, soaring to claim territory, chasing each other in powerful flight displays.

Mated pairs soar high together with wings outstretched. You might hear them make sharp, shrill “chirps” or see them drop their legs to show their talons. Watch for the male to do his Sky Dance in which he folds his wings and dives down, then zooms up in undulating flight like a woodpecker. If his lady is in an amorous mood she’ll head for a perch near the nest and wait for him. When he makes a beeline to join her, mating follows.

And they are loud. During territorial disputes red-tailed hawks soar with exaggerated wingbeats and scream in a sound so blood-curdling that foley editors sometimes use it (incorrectly!) as the voice of the bald eagle on videos.

Meanwhile the crows go silent. It’s hard to believe but there will be a day when you just won’t notice crows any more. As soon as they nest they become very secretive, switching from obnoxious to oblique behavior. You might see them but you won’t hear them unless they’re upset by a predator.

Will we notice when the crows change their ways? It usually takes me a while.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

Eagles Online

February 18, 2009Birds of Prey, Nesting & CourtshipKate St. John

Perhaps you’re as anxious for spring as I am and maybe, like me, you can’t wait to watch the peregrine webcams.

Many of the falconcams aren’t broadcasting yet – or they’re boring – because peregrines in the middle latitudes (that’s most of the United States) don’t lay eggs until March and April.

If you live near a peregrine nest, you’ll see the peregrines doing courtship flights and aerial displays but only occasionally visiting the nest. The falconcams don’t have much to show.

Bald eagles, on the other hand, are deep into family life right now. Courtship is over, the nest is built, and many of the pairs laid eggs in the last two weeks. The eaglecams are up and running and there’s plenty to see.

So while you’re waiting for peregrine season to heat up, here are four Eagle Cams to keep you busy:

The photo above is from the Friends of Blackwater eagle cam at Cambridge, Maryland on the Eastern Shore. Check the Eagle Gallery to see them incubating eggs in a late January snow storm. The adult eagle was covered in snow!
Our ever favorite pair at Norfolk Botanical Garden in Norfolk, Virginia has laid two three eggs. This is the couple who lived through Peyton Place last year with multiple nesting attempts and a chick with avian pox. Fortunately, everything’s fine so far this year.
You can watch the most successful bald eagle pair in Maine on the BioDiversity Research Institute eagle cam in Gorham, Maine.
And there are two eggs at the eagle’s nest at the National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. This site is near the Potomac River in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, less than 4 miles from Antietam Battlefield.

Have fun watching eagles online.

p.s. The number of eggs at these nests keeps going up. See the comments!

(photo is from the Friends of Blackwater eagle cam. Click on the photo to visit the cam. Click here for information on their March 14th Eagle Festival.)

Lead Poisoning

January 30, 2009Birds of PreyKate St. John

In the past several years we’ve become very aware of the dangers of lead poisoning, especially in children. We test our houses for lead paint, recall toys containing lead and filter our water.

But one problem we haven’t solved yet is the lead poisoning we cause in wildlife – and possibly ourselves – from spent bullets, shot and fishing sinkers. The heartbreaking results are lead poisoned loons, dead California condors and dying eagles. Sadly there’s a direct correlation between deer season and an increase in wildlife lead-poisoning. In Iowa it is the major cause of illness in bald eagles.

Because eagles are scavengers, they feast on the gut piles left behind by hunters. While this is an easy source of food – and it’s a good thing someone eats it – the guts contain tiny fragments of lead dispersed by the bullet’s transit. Some fragments are so small they can only be seen by a microscope. It takes just 30mg to kill an eagle.

Symptoms of lead poisoning include loss of balance, gasping, tremors, impaired flight, blindness, eventual starvation and death in two to three weeks. A lead-poisoned eagle is very, very sick. Click here and scroll down for a photo.

The lucky ones are rescued. That’s what happened to the eagle pictured here. She was found by hunters in Stark County, Ohio on December 28 and delivered to Medina Raptor Center. There she received injections of calcium EDTA, a mineral that binds to lead so the body can expel it in urea. It’s a long process and if blood tests show the bird’s lead level is still too high it has to be repeated.

Fortunately this eagle was found in time. She’s still recovering and doing well. We hope she’ll make a full recovery and be released back into the wild.

Meanwhile, is there anything we can do to prevent this? Yes. In 1991, after people realized that ducks and geese were dying of lead poisoning, lead shot was banned for waterfowl hunting. It could be banned for deer and small game hunting, but in the meantime if you know a hunter or fisherman, urge him or her to use non-toxic bullets and sinkers. And if they do use lead bullets, bury or remove the gut pile from the wild.

Better safe than sorry.

(photo by Debbie Parker at Medina Raptor Center. My special thanks go to the Raptor Center for treating and housing Pitt Stop, an injured and unreleaseable peregrine falcon born at Pittsburgh’s Gulf Tower in 2003.)

Daytime Owls

January 8, 2009Birds of PreyKate St. John

Short-eared Owls in flight (photo by Cris Hamilton)

One of the best things about winter in Pennsylvania is the influx of tundra birds who spend the season here. My favorites are the daytime owls: snowys and short-eareds.

Snowy owls are rare but short-eared owls are easily found in grassland habitats at recovered strip mines, especially at Volant and West Lebanon. They’re there because there’s a lot of food: mice and voles.

It’s always amazing to see an owl during the day and short-eareds put on quite a show. They are crepuscular (active at dawn and dusk) so they can appear a couple of hours before sunset on dreary days.

Short-eared Owl (photo by Cris Hamilton)

Their flight is mothlike, floating over the fields as they hunt for small mammals. Sometimes they “bark” when they encounter another owl or when annoyed by an enemy such as a red-tailed hawk. Sometimes they interact in an aerial display (click on the photo above).

I’ll never forget the time Marcy Cunkelman took me to see the short-eared owls at West Lebanon. We parked on a side road in the middle of the grasslands and stood next to Marcy’s car waiting for sunset. It was cold so we pulled up our hoods and put our backs to the wind.

The sun had set but the sky was still light when the owls finally appeared in the distance. Marcy said, “I’ll bring them closer,” pursed her lips and made squeaky mouse-like sounds. The owls were unimpressed and continued floating over the distant fields. Marcy squeaked again and again.

Suddenly, an owl we hadn’t seen flew from behind and crossed directly in front of our faces. He looked back at Marcy as if to say, “Where’d you hide that mouse?”

I went to Volant last weekend and tried to call in the owls but I was never been able to match Marcy’s squeak. The owls ignored me completely.

(photos by Cris Hamilton, taken at Volant Strips. Click on the photo above to see Cris’ picture of two owls interacting.)

Surprise! We hunt at sea

December 23, 2008Birds of Prey, MigrationKate St. John

The headline was Snowy Owl — A Marine Species?

Surprise!

Snowy owls are famous for eating lemmings but scientists are discovering that their food choices in winter are much more diverse than that.

As part of the International Polar Year, a vast study of the arctic ecosystems that are facing global warming, Canadian scientists radio-tagged snowy owls on Bylot Island and followed their winter dispersal via satellite.

Everyone expected to see the owls move south when the lemming population dropped in the fall. Snowy owls nest with great success and produce many young in summers with high lemming populations. In very low lemming years, they don’t nest at all and any time there’s a short food supply, the owls leave.

The satellite maps told an interesting tale. Not only did the snowies fly south, they also moved north, east and west, and they flew long distances: 500 miles north to Ellesmere Island, 2,000 miles southwest to North Dakota and 2,000 miles southeast to Newfoundland. But the most surprising of all were six adult females who dispersed far out over the frozen sea. They spent the winter on the ice in the dark(*).

Are snowy owls a marine species? What did they eat?

Back in the 1950s a report in The Auk described a snowy owl who perched nearly a mile off shore and captured injured eiders at openings in the ice when lemmings were few on the ground. For now the working theory is that those six owls ate eiders. But scientists need more information to prove it. Were the owls stationed near leads in the ice? Do Inuit hunters see snowy owls out at sea when they go hunting in winter? It’ll be another winter or two before IPY knows for sure.

Meanwhile, this summer was a banner year for lemmings, a great year for raising baby snowy owls, and the best winter in a long time for observing snowies in the U.S. and southern Canada.

Kim Steininger visited Amherst Island, Ontario a couple of weeks ago and brought back some spectacular photos, including this one. Click here to see her photo blog about the snowy owls on Amherst Island.

(photo by Kim Steininger)

(*) By the way, “on ice in the dark” is a fairly good description of Dante’s 9th circle of hell.

Eagles on TV!

November 13, 2008Birds of Prey, Books & EventsKate St. John

Sometimes I have the coolest job!

Last week Jill Lykins in our TV programming department asked if I’d review the upcoming PBS Nature show called American Eagle that will air this Sunday, November 16 at 8:00pm.

Of course I said “Yes.” Who wouldn’t want to watch a show about bald eagles?

I received the preview disk yesterday and watched it last night. To me, it was even better than “White Falcon, White Wolf.”

Instead of taking a hands off look at wildlife (White Falcon never had people on screen), this show follows two guys who are hooked on bald eagles. We get to see what they see – and they see a lot!

Bob Anderson of the Raptor Resource Project and cinematographer Neil Rettig film eagles at their winter staging grounds in the Upper Mississippi Valley and in Alaska. They talk about their memories of the time when eagles were scarce and how fascinated they are by these birds. Both of them film eagle families at the nest.

I especially liked the nest scenes – it was like watching the peregrine webcams. There’s great footage of eagles locking talons during courtship flights, parents incubating eggs and feeding chicks, fledglings learning to fly, eagles catching fish right out of the water, eagles playing tag with prey. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

If you’ve been following bald eagles on my blog, you won’t want to miss this show on Sunday, November 16, 2008 at 8:00pm on PBS. In Pittsburgh, that’s WQED.

(photo from PBS Nature. Click on the photo to preview the show.)

Golden

October 22, 2008Birds of Prey, MigrationKate St. John

Golden eagle (photo in the public domain from Zoo Ostrava, Czech Republic) Every fall I visit the Allegheny Front Hawk Watch near Central City, PA in hopes of seeing a golden eagle, but for the past several years I have chosen the wrong days to do it.

Golden eagles pass through southwestern Pennsylvania from the third week of October to the end of November. Because the hawk watch faces east, the best condition for seeing birds is an east wind but that direction can also bring the absolute worst weather – thick fog. Witness my last visit to The Front in November 2007.

Years of bad timing left me discouraged about visiting the hawk watch so I asked Eric Hall, who spends a lot of time out there, to email me if he thought the weather would be good. Eric’s email arrived last Friday so I rolled the dice and went out on Saturday.

Last Saturday was great! The first golden eagle flew past at eye level. He was easy to see but oh, such a brief moment to see him in! Five others passed by much higher and two of them lingered. That’s because both were being harrassed by up to three red-tailed hawks.

The size difference between goldens and red-tails is astonishing. We all think of red-tailed hawks as large birds but when you see one next to a golden eagle it’s dwarfed. It’s similar to watching a blue jay harrass a red-tail. That’s how big a golden is.

Eastern golden eagles nest in Canada and migrate to the mountains of West Virginia where they spend the winter chowing down on mammals. They follow the Allegheny Front to get there, passing through a narrow corridor between the Front and the first mountain in the Appalachian range. We know their route because the National Aviary is working on a Wind Power and Golden Eagles project, fitting golden eagles with satellite transmitters to track their migration.

There’s still plenty of time to visit the Allegheny Front Hawk Watch to see golden eagles. If the weather’s right, they’ll be there. Remember to dress warmly! Hawk watching is just about the coldest activity on earth. Take an extra coat! And click here for directions to the site.

(Golden eagle, photo in the public domain from Zoo Ostrava, Czech Republic. The golden eagle’s range extends through North America, Europe and Asia.)

Ornery

September 29, 2008Birds of Prey, MigrationKate St. John

Sharp-shinned hawk atCrooked Creek, October 2014 (photo by Steve Gosser) — Sharp-shinned hawk at Crooked Creek, October 2014 (photo by Steve Gosser)

By the end of September broad-winged hawks are south of us and the most numerous species at Pennsylvania hawk watches becomes the sharp-shinned hawk.

Rainy weather (in September 2008) kept eastern migration numbers low for the past few days but the mix of raptors has changed nonetheless. At Hawk Ridge in Duluth, Minnesota, where the weather’s been better, there was an enormous peak of broad-winged numbers on September 15th. After that, sharp-shinned numbers grew.

As hawk watchers will tell you, “sharpie” migration does not make for friendly skies. Sharp-shinned hawks are ornery, even belligerent on the wing. Though they prefer to migrate in small groups, they frequently pick fights with fellow travelers. A typical sharp-shinned fly-by goes like this:

We see a sharp-shinned hawk approaching in his characteristic flap-flap-glide flight style. One or two other sharpies are with him and maybe a kestrel. The birds in this little group make good progress until one of the sharpies decides he can’t stand the guy next to him and dive-bombs him. The bird he attacks takes evasive action or attacks him back. They spar for a while — as they migrate! — then calm down and resume normal flight. This happens over and over.

It’s a wonder that sharpies waste time fighting on migration. They’re so lightweight that they have to flap more than other raptors to make headway and course corrections. You’d think they’d save their energy for flying.

But sharp-shinned hawks are highly territorial, so much so that the female attacks her mate if he waits near the nest after delivering food.

Sharpies even go out of their way to attack raptors that could eat them. Perhaps they think that the best defense is a good offense, but it doesn’t always work. Many a sharp-shinned hawk has ended up as lunch after attacking a peregrine falcon.

(photo by Steve Gosser)

Oh my gos(h)!

September 26, 2008Birds of PreyKate St. John

Immature northern goshawk (photo by Debbie Waters, Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory, Duluth, MN) — Immature northern goshawk (photo by Debbie Waters, Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory, Duluth, Minnesota)

September 26, 2008:

Two weeks ago in Maine a red squirrel and I both had a close call. He escaped with his life and I got a thrill.

I was sitting outside the Harbourside Inn at dawn drinking my morning coffee when I heard a rustling sound and a red squirrel’s frightened scream.

Fifty feet away a hawk was chasing breakfast, hopping fast through the trees with wings outspread. His prey, the red squirrel, was cheating death.

Brown and white with a bold white eyebrow and long, powerful, yellow legs the bird had the wingspan of a red-tailed hawk. “Oh my gosh!” I thought, “it’s an immature northern goshawk!”

Until that moment I had never seen a “gos” (*) on the ground. I’d only seen them during quick fly-bys at hawk watches and often needed help identifying them. Not so with this bird. This one fairly shouted “I’m a gos!”

Northern goshawks are the largest North American accipiter. Truly a northern bird, they don’t leave their territory in winter unless their food supply crashes. In Pennsylvania they nest in the northern tier and only come to the southwestern part of the state in winter, but because they prefer forested areas to cities and suburbs it’s unusual to see them in Pittsburgh.

Goshawks are well known for fiercely defending their nests, aggressively attacking humans and even killing raptors who nest nearby. If this bird had been an adult during nesting season I would have been in serious trouble sitting only 50 feet away.

Fortunately the goshawk was young and intent on his meal. I watched the red squirrel escape and the goshawk fly to a perch deeper in the woods.

What a privilege to see him! Though it was a stressful morning for the squirrel, I’m glad he was there to tempt the hawk into the open.

(Thank you to Debbie Waters, Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory, Duluth, Minnesota for her photo of an immature northern goshawk)

(*) A note on pronunciation: “Gos” (pronounced “goss”) is the birders’ nickname for the species. “Goshawk” is pronounced “goss-hawk.”

Outside My Window

A Blog of Birds & Nature with Kate St. John