Raptor banding is a pretty damn cool thing to be able to do - to get face-to-face with a wild hawk for a few minutes, and then release it to continue its journeys. In our very urban world, it's a rare experience indeed.
We get out of that urban world and into the (truly) great outdoors. And the people I work with are just a great group of people - if you're going to spend the day inside a 4 x 8 box, it really helps if you like the others in the box. Today, it was a beautiful day in the Headlands (see below), I was with some really fun people, and (unlike most of this season) the hawks showed up, too.
Preparing for a release photo.
This season started exceptionally slowly for me - I had no birds in the blind until after the peak of the season had passed. In early October, we had a nice busy weekend with good numbers of birds on back-to-back days, then it dropped off again. It wasn't until two weeks ago that I had the my first redtail in the blind for the season. Today, the drought ended.
We were beset with high winds for much of the day. I had moderate hopes at best, with the forecast calling for 15-20 knot NE winds. At those speeds, we can't keep all our nets up, and the birds get more skittish about landing. We saw birds almost immediately, and had the first serious pass (from a Cooper's Hawk) about ten minutes after we started. Happily, we had our first capture (a redtail) after just half an hour. I had just returned to the blind with the bird and was putting it into a can for processing when a second bird came into the site. I looked out to the front just in time to see them pull the trigger on a that one, just four minutes after the first. Better still:
Roughly 90-95% of the birds we catch are juveniles, so trapping an adult is a special occasion. It was the first adult redtail for the guy who caught it; for me it was the first in 5 years (even though I had plenty in earlier years). That was great, in and of itself. But five minutes later, we picked up another bird and then while they were still out on the hill getting that one out of the net, I picked up a fourth bird! Oh yeah, now I remember why I like this so much.
Redtails queued up for processing, giving a nice size comparison - (left to right: a really huge juv female, a petite juv male and an adult female.)
We added a fifth one a few minutes later, and then a sixth - all in about an hour's time. It turned out that the sixth bird was one who had just been released after being banded in one of the other blinds, so we let her continue on her way.
I processed the huge female whose tail you see above. She was the most powerful redtail I can remember handling - she weighed just over 1400 grams, half again as much as the typical juvenile female we see. Even more impressive than her mass was her obvious strength. I have nearly 20 years experience at banding now, and share my home with parrots, so I'm pretty comfortable with birds in hand at this point. Yet every time she flapped her wings, it felt like she'd get away, and she could retract her feet strongly enough that I thought I'd lose my grip.
Birds have a nictitating membrane on their eyes, a sort of translucent third eyelid which helps keep the eyes moist, and clear of dust and debris, among other things. She blinked it a few times (probably because of the wind), including the instant that I snapped this photo. Because it was a nice, close shot and I had the camera set for closeup, you can actually see the membrane in some detail, something that's had to do during a blink. You can see the tiny capillaries in the membrane, and the hawk's iris/pupil behind it. Not something that you see every day...
We joked that we had a half redtail-half golden eagle hybrid, but a look at this photo tells you where such a joke would come from. I hope she gets out there and eats a lot of gophers.
We took the adult redtail up to HawkWatch so the volunteers could see the bird. They watch hundreds - thousands - of hawks every year, but rarely see them up close, so it's a bit of a treat to be able to show them one. They see lots of adults, but not like this...
BTW, check out her cool eye color - they're early in the transition between the pale yellow eyes of a juvenile and the dark walnut eyes of an adult.
The Hawkwatchers had a great day of it too. They can't usually see birds up close like we do, but they can spend a lot more time looking at a really good one that flies over, especially if it's a species we don't band. They had both golden and bald eagles during the day, some late-season osprey, and a really late Swainson's Hawk. There was also a partial albino redtail, with a mostly white body and a blazing red tail that we never caught a glimpse of. It was a nice reminder that the season may be winding down, but any day still has the potential for magic.