This is a brief
status report
on the Northgate Hawks of northern Durham, which I've only recently
started to observe. These are just a few of the
photos I was able to take of the juveniles during a week in July. Next
year I hope to track the birds through the entire nesting season, which
should be very interesting, since the breeding pair are now well
established in this location and the nest is highly visible from
the ground.
I will be posting
more
photos from this season when I find time to process them.
Many thanks to my
friend Mark from the Nature Conservancy for telling me about these
birds!!
My first visit to this site was in
late evening and thus required
aggressive use of high ISO sensitivity (1250), since I decided the
birds were too far for flash. After 45 minutes of Photoshop processing
I was able to extract something moderately aesthetic:
click to zoom
Just for the sake of comparison,
here's the original image, with all
the stats (EXIF data):
click to zoom
There were actually two juveniles
at this site this year, and they spent much of their time fairly close
to one another --- usually within a few trees of each other, or
occasionally even perching on the same branch:
click to zoom
They seemed to spend most of their
time hunting. And as you can see below, they were hunting some pretty
formidable prey animals:
click to zoom
Yes, that's an earthworm!
Although they mostly seemed to be
catching beetles, I saw them catch a fair number of earthworms as
well. Below is a photo of one of the juveniles just after landing
on the ground, feeling around with his or her feet for some tasty
morsel in the grass:
click to zoom
Before too long they tired of
earthworms and grasshoppers and decided to try for something a bit
meatier:
click to zoom
Remarkably, the squirrel totally
ignored the hawk, and the hawk clumsily teetered away from the path of
the foraging squirrel. Apparently, juvie red-shoulders lack the agility
to actually catch and kill a squirrel, and the squirrels know it.
One thing the juvniles
were exceptionally skilled at catching were sticks:
click to zoom
The juvenile shown above was trying
to get airborne with the stick s/he had caught. Note that the stick is
roughly the size of a mouse. The bird actually seemed to have trouble
attaining flight with the stick in its talons. This was clearly a good
exercise for a bird hoping to graduate to larger prey than earthworms.
I have photos of one of the juveniles "catching" pine-cones and making
off with them -- I hope to post these soon.
When the bird shown above was
finally able to get airborne with the stick, s/he took it to the top of
a portable soccar goalie net:
click to zoom
Here the bird fluttered about and
worked hard to maintain its balance with the "prey" item grasped in one
foot, leaving only one other foot for perching --- another skill the
bird will surely need to master in the weeks ahead. Although I don't
include any photos showing this, the bird shown above dropped his or
her stick into the netting and then hopped down to retrieve it, getting
caught in the netting in the process. This did not seem to bother the
bird. He or she was much more interested in retrieving the stick than
in getting himself/herself free of the netting.
Eventually his or
her sibling came and confiscated the wooden "prey" item and also got
caught up in the netting. Although I was afraid I'd have to intervene
to help them get free, they were able to escape the netting themselves,
and one of the birds successfully flew to a high perch, lugging the
stick all the way.
After I'd had
enough of shooting the birds in perched positions, I took the focal
length down from 840mm to 600mm (f/4) and decided to try for some shots
of the birds in flight. Here are a few of the better images I was
able to get (click to zoom):
Although I like these images, I did
note that the bright sunlight resulted in some over-exposure of the
white areas on the birds. This is probably unavoidable in most
cases, since turning down the exposure would result in under-exposure
of the shaded areas of the bird. I've recently started using
Canon's "Hightlight Tone Priority" feature on the 1D Mark III camera to
try to reduce the incidence of over-exposure in bright parts of
birds. I'm not sure yet how well it works.
Finally, here's a
photo of one of the adults, who was hunting with the juveniles one day:
click to zoom
This is the first sighting of the adult that I've had, showing that
while the juveniles are very visible during this period, the adults are
relatively aloof. I don't know if they're simply hunting higher
in the trees (perhaps for aerial prey), or if they're hunting outside
of the park, or if they simply rest most of the day, since they're able
to procure large numbers of calories with a single prey capture.
Stay tuned.
Update: August 10th
Melony from Raleigh was kind
enough to inform me about a family of Cooper's hawks (quite different
from Red-shouldered hawks, since they're accipiters rather than buteos) hanging out in her suburban
neighborhood, and I was able to
get a few decent photos during the hour I spent there last week.
The photos below
are of one of the juveniles at the Raleigh site. Notice the longer tail
with the thick bands (differentiating it from a Red-shouldered hawk),
and the rounded end to the tail (differentiating it from a
sharp-shinned hawk).
(click each photo to
zoom)
In one of the two photos showing
the juvenile from behind, you can see that the bird was gazing intently
at something on the ground. Following its gaze, I think I was
able to identify the animal that the hawk was watching with great
interest: Felis catus -- the
domestic housecat. I don't think the kitty has anything to worry
about from this guy.
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