Greetings Chorusers! This is a short diary about a rather remarkable event that occurred in the past couple of months. A red-tailed hawk chick was reared and successfully fledged from a bald eagle nest.
The nest is in Sidney, BC which is just outside of Victoria on southern Vancouver Island. There are a lot of Bald Eagles in that part of the world. This event has been thoroughly documented and I have embedded a bunch of youtube videos posted by Sasse photography. I focused on the shorter videos, there are several very long ones if you want to spend more time watching this unfold.
The obvious question is: how did this happen? There are two hypotheses. The most likely is that the chick was brought back to the nest by one of the parent eagles as food for the eagle chicks but then it somehow switched status from dinner to family member. Originally there were two hawk chicks but one died rapidly possibly due to injuries sustained when it was brought to the nest, if that is what happened. The second hypothesis, which is considered less likely, is that a red-tail female laid her eggs in the nest for some reason.
It is remarkable, especially given that siblicide is a phenomenon in eagle nests, that the much smaller hawk was able to successfully compete for food and survive. As a side note: the extent of siblicide in eagles seems a bit uncertain. There have been claims that it is virtually universal, i.e. eagles lay two eggs but invariably only fledge one chick. The second egg is basically insurance. However there seems to be a lot of evidence such as this case and many others that bald eagles fledging more than one chick is common (which doesn’t mean siblicide doesn’t happen just that it may not be that common).
One advantage the red-tail has is that it developed much faster than the eagles and left the nest well before they did.
The red-tail chick does seem to have been ‘eaglized’ to some extent according to National Geographic.
That’s it from me. Comment about all things birdy below.