Red-Tails in Love: A Wildlife Drama at Gaston Day School

 For those of you interested in a great natural history read, I recommend Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male's Story--A True Wildlife Drama in Central Park. It is the true story of a pair of red-tailed hawks that were discovered by a group of New York City's Central Park bird watchers after the raptors built their nest on a Fifth Avenue apartment building across from the park. As seen through the eyes of the bird watchers, the fate of the birds and their fledglings is spellbinding.

Gaston Day has its own red-tail hawk drama unfolding right before our eyes. Have you seen the large red-tail hawk that often sits atop the flag pole at carpool drop-off each morning? It is a magnificent bird, and many of the students who enter the school point it out. This morning, Mike Greene, upper-school math teacher, and his son Ian followed the bird after it glided down to sit on the top of the soccer goal on the field's west end. Ian snapped the pictures below. 

I have been watching this hawk and its mate--yes, there are two of them--for several weeks now. One is much smaller than the other, and I assumed that the smaller bird was the female. But I was wrong. So the smaller hawk is the male. The larger hawk is the female. When I researched red-tailed hawks for this post, I learned that the female is usually three inches larger than the male. They will have a nest somewhere nearby this spring, and Gaston Day will have a hatch of young red-tail chicks.

After reading about red-tails on the North Carolina Wildlife site, I understand what our pair is doing each morning. The first thing that a red-tail hawk does after leaving the nest at daybreak is find a high perch nearby. That is what is happening when our female flies up on the flagpole during morning carpool. Her nest has to be close. Has anyone seen it? Be on the look out and let's try to find it. I am going to watch carefully to see what direction she comes from as she flies to the flagpole. That way I may be able to determine the patch of woods where the nest is. So our lady red-tail on the flagpole is just waking up and starting her day. 

After she leaves the flagpole, she will fly aloft 200 or 300 yards up in the sky for as long as two or three hours without stopping or lighting. That is, unless she sees something on the ground to eat. With incredible vision, she is scanning for small rodents, rabbits, reptiles, and even insects. If she spots one, she descends in a steep, 45-degree dive, falling almost like a rock to hit her prey. Once a red-tail focuses on a potential prey, it seldom misses its target. 

Other things I learned in doing research for this post. Did you know that a group of two or more hawks flying together are known as a "boil" or a "knot"? I didn't either.

Seeing our red-tails has already gotten me thinking about the chicks they will hatch in the spring. Won't it be wonderful if we see two or three immature red-tails with their mother out near the flagpole? 

For me, the constancy of nature has been encouraging during the Covid-19 pandemic. For the red-tails at least, things are normal and routine. It will be for us too, you know. The vaccinations are coming soon to protect us. 

In the meantime, I am enjoying the simple beauty of Gaston Day's red-tail hawks and the wonder of creation that they reveal. If you have not seen them, check out the flagpole each morning. 

(photos courtesy of Ian Greene)