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A long holiday weekend with lots of food, lots of family, and a long drive on each end leaves me feeling much how this young Red-tailed Hawk looks.  I’m not the only one, right?  Not that I didn’t have a wonderful weekend but I think I will spend as much of tomorrow as I can [...]

A nice thing about spending 7 months with the same bird, particularly a second year bird, is getting to watch it molt and acquire its adult plumage. Watching a bird mature is also gratifying because the majority of young birds don’t make it to their second birthday, so every adult you see is a special [...]

(Check out Part 1 here) (Check out Part 2 here) This hawk was a fierce hunter. I’ve seen young Red-tailed Hawks who just don’t have the hang of it, counting on luck of good fortune to present them with a careless gopher or a rare easy meal. Patch was focused and deliberate, consistent and inventive. [...]

(Check out Part 1 here) The city can be a tough place to make a living but San Francisco offers raptors a number of parks, small and large, for them to thrive in. But the parks have edges, hard edges, and the hawks have to handle the transitions. Above, Patch the Red-tailed Hawk perches on [...]

I was pretty new to watching birds and photography when I first met this Red-tailed Hawk. While keeping track of some hummingbirds in Alta Plaza Park in San Francisco, I noticed a shadow slipping over the terraced hillside. When I looked up the hawk was five feet above my head and powering towards a perch [...]

Now that I have a car I can get to places that were either too far to be really worth walking to or too difficult to access via mass transit.  Yes, such places exist in New York City, even within my beloved borough of Queens.  One such place is the World’s Fair Marina, located at [...]

Pale Male, the famous Red-tailed Hawk in Central Park, has apparently lost yet another mate.  He is already courting a new woman though, so it seems that his large audience will still have a nest to watch.  Palemaleirregulars has the scoop on the missing Lola.

When it comes to crows, the term “murder” is usually used to describe a flock of these cunning corvids. For the first time, however, I found myself moved to use this word in its more traditional sense when I saw an American Crow taken by a larger avian predator… The bird astride this ex-crow is [...]

In the midst of a full day’s search for rare birds on Long Island and in Queens a common bird stole the show, at least for a little while. A juvenile Red-tailed Hawk was perched on a pine tree in the median at Jones Beach, being assaulted by Northern Mockingbirds. It flew to a second [...]