By the end of September the whining is over. Juvenile raptors, like this young red-tailed hawk, have left home to start life on their own. Now they hunt in silence. Loud begging scares their prey.
I miss the begging sounds of summer because they helped me find songbirds. The whining juvenile red-tailed hawk in the linked video below has attracted songbird attention.
How many songbirds can you identify in the background? (Hint: he was filmed in Michigan.)
(video from Cornell Lab Bird Cams, screenshot from JustBirds)
I’ve been seeing a lot of hawk activity this week here in Oakland around UPMC Presby and the Biomedical Science Tower (BST) building. I saw one hawk perched all the way up on top of BST the other evening and thought he or she must have been really pleased with themselves for finding a vantage point like that.