Chuck Preston | Leslie Patten Books: Wild Places, Sacred Spaces

Hawk and Eagle day

Posted on July 9, 2014 by Leslie

My neighbor called the other night. They own a horse camp for teenagers. The kids were doing volunteer work, stacking timber in piles that the forest service had recently cut down for a fire break alongside their property when they found a young red-tailed hawk on the ground. The hawk was large yet too young to have yet fledged and was starving. Probably the FS had inadvertently cut down the nesting tree.

My neighbor called me because I volunteer at the Buffalo Bill Museum of the West in the Draper Lab and know the person who runs a bird rescue program called Ironside Bird Rescue. The young red-tailed was in bad shape, holding its head under its wing. But my neighbor was able to feed it some elk meat and brought the bird over to my house that evening in a large box. Since I was going to work in the morning, I brought the bird to Ironside. Susan Ahalt of Ironside took the bird inside–weighed it, handed the Red-Tailed to me so she could find some food. The bird was so weak it didn’t even struggle. But Susan found it three mice which she cut up and the Red-tailed gulped them down.

At the Rescue center

Susan said that if the bird survives, then she will first test whether it can feed itself on it’s own. If it can, then she will release it back in Sunlight area where it was found.

The young Red-tailed

Red Tail baby in its cage.

Cutting up mice for the young Red-tailed

I had to rush off because today was a great field trip with the Draper lab folks. Chuck Preston, museum curator, has been conducting a five year Golden Eagle study, locating nest sites and documenting how many chicks are produced and what food they are eating. Today we were off to band a young fledgling.

The museum purchased a drone and we were going to try it out. The drone sounds like a hive of bees. Unlike a regular model airplane, the drone has a GPS, can hover, has a camera that sends back real-time film to a laptop, and essentially looks and acts like something from ‘Back to the Future’ movie. We were going to use the drone to try and scare the young bird off the nest and onto the ground where it could be banded.

Drone over nest with Heart Mountain in background

The drone and the laptap where the live feed comes out. You can see the camera eye down below

Since there were several of us there, we all got into positions on the cliff near the nest in order to track where the bird might fly. The young fledgling can’t fly far, and will invariably fly downward, but it could go up to a mile or two off before landing.

I hiked up to the cliff edges and could see the drone hovering above the nest. Apparently, it didn’t bother the bird in the least. Meanwhile, mom was flying around high overhead wondering what all these people were doing near her baby. In good years the parents will have two young. In lean years only one chick or they won’t nest at all.

Finally, our intern Nat hiked to the nest and the bird flew down about a quarter of a mile downwind. This was a feisty male and certainly didn’t like being handled, a good sign he was in excellent condition. But Chuck is an expert handler and brought the bird into the shade. He measured and weighed the chick, then banded it’s leg.