Cool Hawk Videos

This is a recently hatched Red-tailed Hawk chick. It is covered in soft white downy feathers. The nest is on our ranch in a huge Ponderosa pine tree along the West Fork of the Carson River. Red-tailed Hawks mate for life and a pair has mated, built (actually rebuilt) a nest, and raised one or two chicks every year. In the year this video was taken only a single chick was raised.

The next year after the video above with a single chick in the nest was taken our resident pair of hawks hatched and raised two chicks. These two are a little older and are losing their white downy feathers and growing real feathers to replace them. Raising two chicks puts more stress on the parent hawks and on the chicks. Sometimes only one of them makes it all the way to adulthood.

One of the resident adult Red-tailed Hawks (I can't tell the difference between sexes of these hawks) killed a Mourning Dove 50 yards from our back door and started eating it on a branch of a cottonwood tree. As we filmed the event its fledgling hopped up next to the adult bird. The adult bird then started ripping off pieces of meat and feeding them to the fledgling. This is the first time we witnessed our adult hawks feeding one of their chicks/fledglings outside of their nest high up in a Ponderosa Pine.

This video is a continuation of the feeding behavior described in the above video. We zoomed in to a higher magnification with the spotting scope we used to capture these videos.