Today's Nature Story

About six weeks ago, I began hearing a hawk crying from our woods in the morning and in the afternoon when I walked our dogs. Not every day and not every morning or every afternoon. Sometimes the calls of crows and/or blue jays accompanied the hawk cries.

We have had a red tail hawk’s nest in our woods for over 12 years. The nest is not occupied every spring. This year clearly it is occupied. But I decided not to go look for the nest. It’s in the midst of underbrush – tics and mosquitoes. The only way I could have gone in “safely” was for me to wear long sleeves, long pants and a hat with netting. Just wasn’t going to happen in the heat of July.

However the more often I heard that cry, the more certain I became that it was a young hawk crying. I expected at first that the mother would show up with food for the baby and then it would go silent.

When the crying went on and became more frequent I worried – it clearly was distressed - where in the world is the mother?

One morning about three weeks ago, my stepson and I were standing on our driveway and the hawk flew by crying all the while. It was a young, perfectly-shaped and perfectly-feathered red tail hawk – so young it didn’t have its red tail yet.

Every day we saw it flying – unsteadily at first in the wind – landing in various trees around our property. It was still crying a lot and being harassed by blue jays or crows. Now we were certain that its mother had left (probably been killed). Had she had a chance to teach it to hunt? Would it starve?

I began to talk to it: “You need to learn to fly, to hunt, to find friends and to migrate. You can do it.” I sent those messages out to it every time I saw it.

The flying became steadier. It stayed on our property but was moving around: once on our driveway tree, once in a tree in the back field. Its home base continued to be its nest.

Then on August 10 my husband saw it with another hawk. But that other hawk was mature; it was catching a thermal in the air and as “our” hawk cried, the other hawk circled in the thermal air and gradually was several thousand feet high and then soared out of sight. Our young hawk stayed behind.

Again on August 12 another hawk rose circling into the thermal leaving the youngster behind crying.

Finally, on August 14 while I was working at Unity, my husband and stepson watched our baby hawk, alone, figure out a thermal on its own. It circled into the air, higher and higher until it was thousands of feet high, a speck, and then it soared away.

Would it come back or was it on its way? A couple days later it returned to its home but is not as distressed. It’s too soon to migrate but I now know, when it is time, it has the skills to stay alive, to rise into the sky and soar with its fellow red tail hawks, to migrate south for the winter and ultimately to find its own mate.

Isn't nature grand!

~ JEAN

P.S. Sadly I am not a good enough photographer to get photos of "our" hawk. These are stock photos of red tail hawks but give you the idea of what we are seeing at home.