2019 venture vermont: Learn a bird call. Send us a recording.

this spring while i was up on girl scout camp property, i kept hearing a hawk. i was able to identify it as a broad-winged hawk (buteo platypterus), and later in the spring there was a lot of territorial hawk calling and then when i was up there with some people we thought we saw a nest.

oh yes. the female went and put her nest right in our parking lot, right over the place where the busses disgorge the campers and the parents pick up and drop off girls and sure enough the precious little chick (really a huge bird, even right out of the egg) hatched JUST before camp started and what had seemed a perfect quiet neighborhood was  now an alarming one teeming with juvenile top-level predators, although eventually i think the mother was able to piece together the basic fact that while we are a species that eats eggs and poultry, we are not for the most part going to climb that slender tree and eat her chick and our presence both discourages tree climbing predators and increases the amount of delicious, delicious rodents, because children leave a surprising amount of food crumbs, which rodents love.

anyway, the chick stepped out of the nest early and plopped to the ground while we were sitting right there one day and then it flailed around in the bushes trying desperately to get out of our sight while we politely DID NOT LOOK AT IT.

it was fun for me, as the staff naturalist, to explain to the children why we would purposely not look at such an awesome thing, but we got that all sorted out and over the next week or so we kept hearing the chick and the mother calling to each other and seeing behavioral evidence that the now huge but still flightless chick was still being cared for and assisted somewhere on the ground in our forest.

then, at about the time when the chick should have been fully fledged, i stopped seeing them so much. i hope they're both well.

my recording of this female hawk can be found on an inat observation page here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/26327429