{"id":49067,"date":"2017-06-15T05:03:35","date_gmt":"2017-06-15T11:03:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=49067"},"modified":"2017-06-15T05:47:11","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T11:47:11","slug":"this-is-what-can-happen-when-a-red-tailed-hawk-nest-is-blown-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/15\/this-is-what-can-happen-when-a-red-tailed-hawk-nest-is-blown-down\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is What Can Happen When A Red-tailed Hawk Nest Is Blown Down"},"content":{"rendered":"

The shortsightedness and thoughtlessness\u00a0of mankind\u00a0aren’t the only threats to nesting birds. Natural events can play a role too.<\/p>\n

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I’ve been watching this Red-tailed Hawk nest on a power pole for about three months now. In this photo the mated pair was beginning the construction of the nest on March 24th of this year. Other than checking the nest out when I drive by occasionally I haven’t paid a lot of attention to it photographically because it’s so high up on a pole.\u00a0While the female was incubating and the chicks were growing I just couldn’t see into it very well.<\/p>\n

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This is what that pole looked like\u00a0yesterday morning – the nest was gone without even a stick of it left up there. Because of bad weather and poor light I haven’t visited it for a while but in my absence\u00a0a storm system last week produced incredibly strong winds that obviously blew the nest down (they were strong enough to overturn multiple big rigs on I-80 and the\u00a0freeway had to be closed for many hours).<\/p>\n

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And this is what I found nearby – two Red-tailed Hawk chicks that had obviously been blown down with the nest last week in those incredible winds. There was\u00a0also a third chick perched about 5′ off the ground in a small tree (it was in bad light so I didn’t take any photos but now I wish I had).<\/p>\n

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Both parents of these young hawks were perched on adjacent power poles very close by and the chicks\u00a0appeared to be thriving so it seemed pretty apparent to me that they were being fed and watched over but still\u00a0I had to make a decision. Should I take them\u00a0to a rehab center or leave them be? I chose the latter and\u00a0drove off.<\/p>\n

But after I left I kept wondering\u00a0if I had made the right decision so after I got home I called Dalyn Erickson at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Northern Utah (WRCNU – they were the rehabbers for Galileo – the Short-eared Owl we rescued off of barbed wire\u00a0a year ago). After filling her in on all the details she agreed that in this case\u00a0the young hawks should be left in place. She said that as long as the hawks were old enough to be mobile (they were, the third one was even partly up a tree), they looked and acted healthy (they did, absolutely) and the parents were nearby (they were – both of them) they had the best chance if they weren’t “rescued”. In her words\u00a0“the parents can do a much better job than we (WRCNU) can”.<\/p>\n

Still it was\u00a0disturbing to see these chicks on the ground at this age. I wish that damned storm had waited a couple of weeks before it created such havoc.<\/p>\n

I wish them well in a difficult situation.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The shortsightedness and thoughtlessness of mankind aren’t the only threats to nesting birds. Natural events can play a role too.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49069,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,391,450],"tags":[452,740,3410,3409,451,1764,311,1078,2209,3056],"class_list":["post-49067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-nesting-and-mating","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-chicks","tag-high-winds","tag-nest-blown-down","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-storm","tag-utah-2","tag-wildlife-rehabilitation","tag-wildlife-rehabilitation-center-of-northern-utah","tag-wrcnu"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/red-tailed-hawk-0728-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-cLp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}