Bald eagles rearing red-tailed hawk chick
Experts surprised that youngster has survived, so far
Birds of different feathers are sticking together in Sidney — at least for the time being.
In an old Douglas fir by the ocean, a fluffy, grey, red-tailed hawk chick is sharing a nest with three baldeagle chicks.
What’s surprising to birders is that the bald-eagle parents are feeding the outsider like it’s one of their own.
The question, however, is how long before the eaglets turn on their feathered friend and look at the baby hawk as food.
“The fact that it survived so long is absolutely amazing,” said David Bird, a raptor specialist for 40 years at McGill University in Montreal who has retired to Sidney. “The big question is: Will it survive the next week to get out of the nest?”
Bird said what probably happened is that one of the bald eagles raided a red-tailed hawk’s nest and grabbed maybe one, two or three youngsters. When they were dumped into the bald eagle’s nest, most were already dead — except for one.
“My guess is that this little guy begged loud and hard for food — not even thinking about the danger,” he said. “Food overrides everything in these birds. He begged away and mom and dad said, ‘OK, here’s an open, gaping beak. Let’s put food in it.’ ”
Within about a week, he said, the red-tailed hawk chick will be about 5½ weeks old and ready to leave the nest. Bird doesn’t think the bald eagles had any intention of bringing the hawk chick back to their nest for the sake of fattening it up to feed to their youngsters. But that might happen anyway.
What the hawk chick needs, he said, is food to keep coming for two to three weeks while it learns how to fly and hunt.
“The three eaglets may fledge first. They’ll keep coming back to sit in the nest at nighttime,” said Bird, who lives about 10 minutes away from the bald eagle nest. “They may change their mind and decide to eat this little guy.”
The nest, in the Shoal Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary, is in the front yard of Kerry Finley, an avid birder and the sanctuary’s designated caretaker.
He said the eagle’s nest has been in the tree since 1991. In Sidney, the nest is highly visible and always being monitored.
Oddly enough, even though the nest and its unusual inhabitants are right under his nose, Finley said he wasn’t the first to notice the strange thing on his doorstep.
“It wasn’t until people started showing up with big cameras that I noticed that there was something amiss in the nest,” he said.
Finley said the hawk chick is very aggressive and appears to be able to fend for itself.
“It’s quite something to see the way it is treated,” he said. “The parents are quite attentive. The other birds are keeping their distance — they know it is something different.”