July With the Tompkins Square Hawks: Parts I-IV

I've been going to Tompkins Square Park a lot to see the five red-tailed hawks (two adults and three youngsters), and they have been wildly entertaining. I've posted other videos and photos of these hawks, but am now putting together a series of videos featuring them. 

Tompkins Square Park, July 1, 2016

I'm trying to give a sense of the hawks, how they behave, play, hunt, eat and just hang around. My camera is not great for capturing flight shots or action video, but I do what I can. As with all of my videos, watch what you want, skip around, enjoy them for what they are. They are long, but are sort of a documentation.

These videos are from July 1 (the day I thought I saw rat poison being put out), July 2, July 8 and July 10. I will be adding more later in another posting. I decided not to use music (except music playing in the park), so you'll hear either silence (when my conversation or that of others was particularly inane) or park sounds.

These photos are from July 1. Photos from the other three days will be added to this posting later (still going through them). The first photo is from a smaller little garden area just east of Tompkins Square Park. The fence surrounding the little garden is decorated with art, apparently from found objects. Just delightful. The second photo is of Christo, the red-tailed father. The third photo shows one of his offspring on a branch above him. The offspring is bigger!

Pale Male and His Kids Find Dinner

There are three graphic videos in this posting. I watched Pale Male, our Central Park celebrity red-tailed hawk, dining on pigeon on June 30, after repeatedly calling to his two youngsters to "come 'n' get it!" On July 7, I saw one of his youngsters raiding a robins' nest, and on July 9, I saw a Pale Male youngster eating a starling.

On July 7, after I finished a day of background work in Queens, I return to Manhattan and got off the train at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. I saw Woody, then walked north to Conservatory Pond to look for Pale Male's kids. I found one sitting above the tables at the outdoor cafe east of the water.

The young hawk looked around, spotted something, then flew near the Alice in Wonderland statue and perched briefly ...

... before returning just north of the cafe, where it attacked a robins' nest. The young hawk ate the robin nestlings, as I saw his father do last year so many times, as the hysterical robins cried and bombarded the predator to no avail.

I do not recommend this video to any who are upset by violence in nature. I almost couldn't watch, although I did take the video (which is very jumpy in spots). These hawks are so beautiful, but they can be brutal.

The bird then flew to a tree just south, where the youngster was joined by the sibling. The sibling had a crop the size of a cantaloupe, indicating the young hawk had also eaten very well. When I left, the two birds were perched, one atop the other, in the tree.

On July 9, a Pale Male kid ate starling. I am not sure whether the young hawk caught it, or if it was brought in by Pale Male. 

On June 30 around noon, Central Park's celebrity red-tailed hawk, Pale Male, flew over the 79th Street transverse with a pigeon and landed on a tree above Glade Arch. He called his two youngsters to have lunch. He kept calling as he plucked the pigeon and moved to another branch. After a quarter of an hour, he began to eat the pigeon, but kept calling softly to his fledglings. They never came, and Pale Male finished the meal.

I then left for the Yankees game, with some very striking video and photos.

Pale Male with pigeon, Glade Arch, June 30.

I did not add music to the video, and kept as much sound on as I could so you can hear the robins and blue jays screaming and hear the camera clicks. I removed the inane conversations I was hearing.

Red, White and Blue: Black-Crowned Night Herons

I've always been intrigued by the black-crowned night herons. At first I couldn't figure out where the black crown was — their heads have always looked blue to me. Maybe I just never see them with black crowns, or maybe whoever named them was missing a couple of color cones. Anyway, I think of them as the patriotic birds, with their blue and white feathers, and those red, red eyes.

The turtles photo bomb a black-crowned night heron at the Pond, June 28, 2016.

We've had several of these herons at the 59th Street Pond recently. At least one of them flies over to the spot where I'm feeding the ducks and waits for the fish to show up. I haven't seen a heron catch a fish using this method, but as my video shows, I have seen them catch very big fish, and gobble them right now. The Filming the Feathers film includes sightings on June 23, 24, 28, 30, July 1, 3 and 5, and is set to a wind octet by Beethoven.

It's really nice when the black-crowns come so close, since the head shots are delightful. I also love trying to spot them in the trees.

I understand these guys eat rats, too. I'm all for that! To see more heron photos, visit the black-crowned night heron page.