{"id":70981,"date":"2019-04-16T06:17:55","date_gmt":"2019-04-16T12:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=70981"},"modified":"2019-04-16T07:22:26","modified_gmt":"2019-04-16T13:22:26","slug":"red-tailed-hawk-gathering-nesting-material-is-very-hard-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/16\/red-tailed-hawk-gathering-nesting-material-is-very-hard-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Red-tailed Hawk – Gathering Nesting Material Is Very Hard Work"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my recent post about this hawk carrying large pieces of nesting material to the nest blog follower Lyle Anderson made the following observation in a comment: “In the first photo it looks like he pulled an entire dead plant from the ground. I could use a hawk like that in my yard right now.”.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lyle’s comment was the inspiration for today’s post.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t planned on publishing this series of photos because of their mediocre (at best) quality. I was far away from the bird so these shots have been drastically cropped and in several of them my camera (not me this time) screwed up the exposure which I had to try to remedy during processing and it shows.<\/p>\n

But Lyle’s comment inspired me to review this series again and I was so impressed by the hard work and determination of the hawk I decided to document his almost heroic efforts at gathering this particular piece of nesting material.<\/p>\n

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This is the male of the pair of Red-tailed Hawks I photographed three days ago. When it comes to gathering nesting material he might be the hardest working raptor I’ve ever photographed. He was tireless in his efforts as his less-than-ambitious mate spent most of her time perched on nearby rocks watching him as he worked.<\/p>\n

Here he’s chosen a twig that turned out to be still attached to the bush it grew from.<\/p>\n

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So he attempted to break it off by lifting it, apparently hoping that it would detach from the rest of the larger branch.<\/p>\n

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When that didn’t work he tried pulling it away.<\/p>\n

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But it just wouldn’t come off of the larger branch it was attached to so he…<\/p>\n

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gave it every ounce of strength he had in this herculean effort to detach the twig. I can’t imagine a better pose than this for demonstrating how hard he was trying.<\/p>\n

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But in the end the twig didn’t break off of the smaller branch, instead the entire branch broke off and pulled away from the rest of the bush.<\/p>\n

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I doubt that was his intention and for a few moments he just stood there with the entire “tree” in his bill as if he was wondering “How in the hell did I get this monster and what am I going to do with it?”<\/p>\n

In the end I don’t know for sure how all this turned out because immediately after this shot was taken I turned my lens to his mate who was perched nearby. My guess is that he abandoned this huge branch because it was too big, too unwieldy to fly with or wouldn’t make good construction material, even if he did manage to get it to the nest.<\/p>\n

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All I know for fact is that two minutes after the previous photo was taken he was on his way to the nest with this much smaller piece of nesting material. I suppose it’s possible that he removed this piece from the larger branch in the previous photos but I suspect that he abandoned that branch altogether and found another piece elsewhere.<\/p>\n

This is the kind of activity he was involved in for the entire time I was with him. He made many trips to the nest while his mate mostly just watched.<\/p>\n

I’ll bet he was plumb tuckered out by mid-morning so I hope he got some rest after I left the area.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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When it comes to gathering nesting material this male Red-tailed Hawk might be the hardest working raptor I’ve ever photographed.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70986,"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":[452,3984,211,1307,451],"class_list":["post-70981","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-carrying-nesting-material","tag-male","tag-nest-building","tag-red-tailed-hawk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/red-tailed-hawk-8852-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-isR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70981","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=70981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}