Our red-shouldered hawks have hatched their egg(s) and the nest is no longer even a little sleepy. Mom and Dad are steadily coming and going and feeding the little ones. I think there is more than one, but I cannot tell yet.
This week’s post is a video of our happy family.
In the video below, you can make out a chick eating from the adult’s bill. I can’t promise this will be easy to see. The chick is the small whiteish fluff ball that bobs above the rim of the nest now and again to take food from the parent. I think the item being torn up and consumed is a small lizard.
With this, and all these videos, you will see better if you watch full screen. To do that, just click that diamond/square icon in the lower right of the video window.
The parents take turns watching over the chicks. I don’t know who’s mom and who’s dad, but one of them is considerably lighter than the other so I am calling them LB (light bird) and DB (dark bird). In the video below, LB returns to the nest with the lizard, DB pecks LB’s beak, and LB drops the lizard. I am narrating this for you because it’s very hard to see even in slow motion. I have been blowing the video up on my television and watching it in very slow motion to get any idea of what’s really going on.
I have almost 20 minutes of video and have chopped it down to these clips. Most of the time, the parent just hangs around and offers bits of food to chicks. Nothing much happens besides that in the next video, but it is lovely to see a hawk just being a hawk.