More Baby Hawks Visit A Small Tucson Desert Garden

Life has taken a twist for Baby Huey and his parents  since he dropped out of his nest a couple of weeks ago.  Now we think there were 3 baby Cooper Hawks, not one, in the nest, with the original Baby Huey having met his demise.  Last week we went a couple of days without seeing Huey and then happened upon a dead immature hawk not far from our house on one of our morning walks.  You would have thought we had lost a beloved pet. But, God is good, and we were greeted the same day with Huey's larger brother and eventually, a smaller sister.

We now have a pic of the mother (right).  She is small, compared to the father, and from what we can tell does most of the parenting which includes  dive bombing us when we come near one of her babies.  We now wear protective head gear when picking up the mail knowing the path runs near the nest.  So far no injuries, except Susan did bang up her knee trying to dodge an attack and ran into our heavy wrought iron door.  The larger father hangs out across the street in Carl and Barb's pine tree.  He is quite impressive sitting on his big pine branch and surveys our house it seems 24/7.  To our knowledge, that's pretty much all he does.  When the mother isn't observing her chicks from the Eucalyptus tree in our yard, she is out hunting.  As you will see, she does a good job at this as the 2 remaining immature hawks are now as big, if not bigger, than she is!

To the left is one of the babies relaxing on top of the fort I built for our granddaughters (see a previous chapter of my blog if you are interested in building one).  Both of the babies have become used to seeing us and unlike their parents tolerate us watching them at close range.  This drives the mother nuts of course and when she has dinner she drops it (usually a desert mouse) in front of the baby without bothering to land if we are watching.

I have stitched together another video of the two immature hawks and as you will see they are not camera shy.

We didn't see the young hawks today, which is unusual, but did see the dad hanging out on the pine tree.  Till next time!