The Rynerson Park Red-tailed Hawks

When I took the family over to the Lakewood Equestrian Center this past weekend, the Red-tailed Hawks whose nest is in the adjacent Rynerson Park were hanging out near the ponies. 

I am pretty sure the Rynerson Park hawks are a family of four.  When I saw them the first time on May 15th, the mother and two babies were in the nest.  About a week later, on May 23rd, I saw one of the juveniles and both parents. 

The girl in the pictures above is one of those juveniles.  Her belly is still heavily speckled, but her chest is losing a little of its red tinge.  She was perched on the lowest cross-beam of one of the electrical towers running through the Equestrian Center and Rynerson park.  The Equestrian Center, in addition to being overrun with rabbits, is also home to a metric assload of voles*.  The area under the electrical tower was so undercut with vole tunnels that my brother could feel the ground collapsing under his feet when he walked over them.

We kept watching one oblivious little vole poking its head out of its tunnel with this huge hawk about 10 feet up right behind it.  And believe you me, the hawk was watching that vole's every move.  You could tell that if the vole were to venture just a little too far out of the hole, the hawk would swoop.  But probably because we were there, it never did, so she never did.  Here she is above stretching right before she flew off to another electrical tower a little further away from bothersome people.

(Side note: My wife advised me the bird in this picture is too far away and is too small. Which I take as 100% support for me getting a crazy-expensive super-telephoto lens. Anyway, I know it's small, but click on it to embiggen, and you'll see that little sucker hollering like crazy.) 

I love this time of year because the baby hawks won't shut up.  Step out in my yard anytime of day and you'll hear the babies a block away, the Volk Street Hawks, calling and calling and calling.  It's incessant.  The only thing more constant is me, saying to whomever is around, "Hear the hawks?"  While we were all standing around looking at the one hawk low down on the electrical tower in the Equestrian Center, her sister (brother?) was perched on top of the adjacent tower shrieking like a banshee.

She flew off just moments after her sister did.

These posts might be a little hawk-heavy lately, but you can't say I didn't warn you.  I love 'em, and I hope to be able to keep coming back to them from time to time.

The juvenile Rynerson Park Red-tailed Hawks, June 13, 2010, in the Lakewood Equestrian Center, around 4:30 p.m.

* 2024 update (because I'm a narcissist and sometimes re-read my old writing.) In the intervening 14 years since I wrote this, I have learned that the things that make those tunnels everywhere in my neighborhood are pocket gophers, not voles.