The Club publishes two print publications (now also available online). ![]() Graduate students, and scholarships for young birders. The Club offers research grants in avian biology for undergraduate and With people who share an enthusiasm and concern for birds. Informative programs are combined for an exciting weekend of meeting Opportunity to see many different kinds of birds. Meeting sites are selected to give participants an The Club meets each winter, spring, and fall at different locations in Paul resident Val Cunningham, who volunteers with the St.The Carolina Bird Club, Inc., is a non-profit educational and scientificĪssociation open to anyone interested in the studyĪnd conservation of wildlife, particularly birds. No luck this year the red-tailed hawk pair didn't build a nest in the nearby park this spring. Starting in February, I kept an eye out for a large stick nest high in a tall deciduous tree, fingers crossed that a pair of red-tails would choose my neighborhood as their nesting and hunting ground. There is no quid pro quo in nature: The major predator of red-tailed hawklets in the nest is the great horned owl. If they abandon a nest in subsequent years, it becomes fair game for other creatures, especially great horned owls, a species that doesn't build its own nests. They build large (up to 3 feet across) nests high in trees to raise their brood of two to three youngsters. This red-tail shows a distinctive “belly band.”īack to the pair of hawks I observed in my local park: Red-tails tend to stay together until one of them dies, often returning to the same area to nest. Luckily for identification purposes, these are seldom seen in our area. And there are even very dark versions of this species, and very pale ones, as well. ![]() Look at the pale chest and belly, and then the series of speckles across the belly, a mark called the "belly band." Just to confuse things, some red-tails have a very light or even nonexistent belly band. Juvenile birds will molt into a red tail in their second year, if they live that long: Young raptors must learn very quickly to feed themselves, a difficult thing, and fewer than half of red-tails make it to their first birthday.Ī close look at a red-tailed hawk reveals additional features that single it out from other species. Juvenile red-tailed hawks show no red instead their tails are made up of a series of horizontal stripes. But the opposite is not necessarily true. Red-tails are easy to identify, except when they aren't: All adults show the distinctive red tail, so if you observe a big hawk with a red tail, it's a red-tailed hawk. These big workmanlike hawks know that watching and waiting is a successful hunting strategy. Many are migratory, but more than a few remain in our state over the winter, joined by red-tails from northern Canada coming down to spend the cold season.Įxcept for its astonishing beauty, this is not a showy hawk, no 200-mph drops onto pigeons (like peregrine falcons), no slashing attacks on songbirds at your feeders (like Cooper's hawks). This is the most numerous and widespread hawk on our continent, found from Washington state to Florida and everywhere in between (except North Dakota). And they hunt over open fields, in slow, wheeling flights, sometimes even helicoptering in place as they watch for prey below. They're the quintessential highways hawks, perching on top of freeway lighting to watch for rodents in the ditches. Red-tailed hawks also are astoundingly beautiful, and they're not at all difficult to see. Why would I want these hawks living nearby? Consider that they eat squirrels and rabbits, in addition to a diet heavy on small rodents. This wasn't a faint hope because red-tails have nested in my neighborhood for the past several years, once right in someone's front yard tree. The two hawks perched together for many minutes in the oak, looking for all the world like a mated pair, leading me to hope that they'd soon start building a nest nearby. On a warm and sunny winter day as I walked through a local park, it seemed things couldn't get any better, and then, suddenly, they did: A handsome red-tailed hawk flapped low over my head and landed in a tall oak, followed soon after by a second red-tail.
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