{"id":73343,"date":"2019-07-11T04:53:27","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T10:53:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=73343"},"modified":"2019-07-11T05:44:11","modified_gmt":"2019-07-11T11:44:11","slug":"two-more-red-tailed-hawk-chicks-have-fledged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/11\/two-more-red-tailed-hawk-chicks-have-fledged\/","title":{"rendered":"Two More Red-tailed Hawk Chicks Have Fledged"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the tough times raptors and other birds are going through these days two more successfully fledged Red-tailed Hawks is good news indeed.<\/p>\n

I’ve been following a Red-tailed Hawk nest for months now but I didn’t want to post any photos of the nest until the chicks had fledged and dispersed. The nest is on a nearly vertical cliff that has exceptionally high contrast in direct sunlight so many of the photos below are hard on the eyes and not very attractive. Please try to look beyond that if you can. These photos are meant primarily as documentation.<\/p>\n

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6\/28\/19<\/em><\/p>\n

The nest is actually an old raven’s nest built at the entrance to a small alcove or shallow cave in the cliff. The alcove is deep enough that both fledglings could disappear in its depths. And as you’ll see in the photos below the nest looks very different at different angles and in different light.<\/p>\n

In this photo taken 14 days ago only one of the youngsters is visible at the top of the nest.<\/p>\n

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One of the parents was the rufous female I’ve posted photos of in the past. Here we see evidence of some serious molting in her tail. It was her, rather than her mate, who made most of the food deliveries to the nest that I observed.<\/p>\n

Things got pretty rambunctious at the nest entrance whenever she delivered a meal so…<\/p>\n

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she usually made a quick getaway.<\/p>\n

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Here we see both chicks five days later. I was shooting at a different angle and the light is very warm this early in the morning.<\/p>\n

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By now the older youngster of the two was exercising its wings fairly often.<\/p>\n

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Here the female had just delivered food to the nest and as per usual all hell broke loose as both chicks competed for the meal. I was impressed by her patience with them in that confined space but even her patience had limits so…<\/p>\n

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she’d usually beat a quick retreat. Here the chick on the left is mantling the food to protect it from its sibling who actually seems disinterested. Perhaps it wasn’t hungry or maybe it just wasn’t interested in a confrontation.<\/p>\n

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7\/04\/19<\/em><\/p>\n

By two days later both youngsters were pretty reliable at aiming their excreta out into the open space in front of the nest. But as evidenced by all of the poop stuck to the cliff on the left side of the nest that hadn’t been the case when they were younger.<\/p>\n

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Here the chicks had just exchanged places on the nest and it would always make me a little nervous when they did that because there wasn’t much room up there for two clumsy birds of this size to accomplish it safely. It could be a serious misfortune if one of them fell but thankfully that never happened.<\/p>\n

By now I was really anticipating the day of fledging because once they had left the nest I should have many opportunities to photograph them on the ground and low perches as the practiced their flight skills and waited for their parents to deliver food. But for me it’s a two hour drive just to get there so I sure as hell couldn’t make the trip every day.<\/p>\n

And then, wouldn’t you know it. Because of overcast morning weather and responsibilities that kept me at home I couldn’t make the trip again until yesterday morning.<\/p>\n

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7\/10\/19<\/em><\/p>\n

And when I got there the nest was empty. I spent some time searching the area but never found the fledglings or their parents so I suspect they’ve all moved on to other areas where the food resources aren’t so depleted.<\/p>\n

I wish them luck. Relatively few young raptors survive even through their first year so they’re going to need all the luck they can get.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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PS – I want to make it clear that I never approached the nest closely and I never got out of my pickup as I was shooting from a road. If I had altered the behavior of these hawks I’d have left the area immediately. I was usually photographing the nest at an effective 1120 mm and these photos have all been cropped significantly. Getting the shot is never worth disturbing nesting birds.<\/em><\/p>\n

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With the tough times raptors and other birds are going through these days two more successfully fledged Red-tailed Hawks is good news indeed.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73362,"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":[334,392,391,450],"tags":[452,740,2975,228,451,4621,311],"class_list":["post-73343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-nesting-and-mating","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-chicks","tag-fledglings","tag-nest","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-rufour-color-morph","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/red-tailed-hawk-8121b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-j4X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73343","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=73343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}