A red-tailed hawk chick being raised by a family of bald eagles in Sidney has become so famous he’s been given nicknames by birders.
The chick has been called Stephen Hawking, after the noted British physicist who has beaten the odds and lived with motor neurone disease since the 1960s. He’s also being called Hawklet and Little Eaglet.
Another nickname is Little Big Man, the title of a Hollywood movie about a European settler raised from childhood in the 19th century by the indigenous Cheyenne.
That’s the moniker given to the bird by David Bird, a retired McGill University raptor specialist living in Sidney.
He thinks the scrappy chick had to have some panache to survive in a nest with three eaglets, each of which was up to four times bigger.
Bird said he believes the hawk has also survived because of the abundance of food, primarily fish.
“The bottom line is that he was much smaller, and eagles always prey on things that are weaker than them,” Bird said.
“If they happened to get hungry it would have been curtains, but there was always lots of food in the nest. That and his attitude, being aggressive. He was running through the legs of the three eaglets and taking food from their beaks.”
Bird said about a dozen or so people are regularly gathered around the nest taking photographs and watching over the famous red-tailed hawk.
Much to Bird’s surprise, the bird is also exhibiting other unusual behaviour: he’s going into the backyards of nearby residents to use bird baths.
“I’ve never heard of a red-tailed hawk doing that,” he said.
The hawk, now about 12 weeks old, was raised in a bald eagle nest in an old Douglas fir by the ocean in Shoal Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary.
Bird believes that the hawk thinks of itself as an eagle.
“This guy has definitely imprinted on bald eagles, and thinks he’s a bald eagle,” he said. “The eaglets that he was raised with seem to have accepted him as another sibling, and the parents seem to have adopted him as their young.”
Bird said the hawk is likely a male because of its size and sculpted head that stands out on its body; in a female, the head and body meld smoothly and aren’t as distinctive.
While bigger bald eagles don’t regularly prey on faster, more agile red-tailed hawks, the two species have what Bird called a “hateful relationship.”
“They don’t like each other,” Bird said in a phone interview.
Bird said the red-tailed hawk chick likely ended up in the eagle’s nest due to non-lethal predation. The surviving hawk chick, along with another, were likely taken by one of the adult eagles from a nest with the idea of feeding them to the eaglets, Bird said.
One died. The surviving chick, not realizing the danger it was in, kept begging and triggered a mothering response in the adult eagle.
Bird said the hawk chick is flying and extending its range, but isn’t yet behaving like a hawk. He’s been seen walking around the sand flats by the ocean poking around seaweed — which is typical bald eagle behaviour.
More typical for a hawk, he said, is to be perched on a light standard or fence post looking for mice, rabbits or snakes to hunt.
In the next few weeks, the hawk will either figure out how to find food on his own or he won’t. If he doesn’t, he will become weaker and weaker and won’t be able to fly. “That’s when I think we would catch him and retrain him in a wildlife rehabilitation facility.”
