Hawk Chicks at 79th St. Nest Succumb
When I went to shoot the 79th St. chicks in the nest on Sunday morning I ran into Leslie Day who told me that none of the chicks had been seen in more than a day. A woman came by and said she saw the female remove a carcass from the nest earlier in the morning. She said she picked up the carcass and put it in the trash so the dogs would not get it.Leslie and I retrieved from the trash and I took this shot of her holding the carcass. I called Lincoln and he told me he would take it to Ward Stone on Monday to have a necropsy done.
This piece appeared in the New York Times today:
3 Baby Hawks Feared Dead After One’s Body Is Found
Three nestlings born in recent weeks to red-tailed hawks in the south end of Riverside Park in Manhattan are believed to have died, bird experts said on Monday.
The body of only one young hawk — or eyas — has been recovered so far. The city’s avid bird-watchers have confirmed that the other two babies are not in their West Side nest and are feared dead as well.
“It’s so devastating,” said Dr. Leslie Day, who recovered the body of one of the chicks on Sunday and kept it refrigerated to preserve it.
On Monday morning, Dr. Day, a naturalist who teaches at the Elisabeth Morrow School and the Bank Street College of Education, gave the body to a friend, the photographer Lincoln Karim. Mr. Karim planned to drive to Delmar, N.Y., near Albany, and turn the corpse over to Ward B. Stone, who runs the Wildlife Pathology Unit of the State Department of Environmental Conservation. Mr. Stone was expected to perform a necropsy to determine the cause of death.
Dr. Day said she first heard something might be amiss on Saturday morning, when she got a call from Beth Bergman, a friend who watches and photographs the birds. Later that evening, Dr. Day received an e-mail message from Mr. Karim, also expressing alarm. (Mr. Karim runs the Web site palemale.com, which follows the lives of two more well-known East Side hawks, Pale Male and Lola.)
“On Sunday morning I went out at 7 a.m.,” Dr. Day said in a phone interview on Monday. “Standing at the nest, I could see there were no babies. They had become so large, standing at the rim, strengthening their wings.”
Dr. Day said she told a friend, Cal Vornberger, the author of “Birds of Central Park,” that she was worried.
“At that moment a dog walker came by,” Dr. Day recalled, “saying another dog walker had seen the mom carrying her dead baby out to drop on the ground.”
The dog walker told Dr. Day that the other dog walker had said she could not bear to leave the body on the ground and had placed it in a bag, then in a trash can. Dr. Day and the second dog walker, who herself walked by, went to the trash can and retrieved the body.
“And this was Mother’s Day,” Dr. Day said sadly.
While the cause of death awaits a toxicology analysis, Dr. Day suspected that the parents may have fed the nestlings pigeons or rats that contained lethal levels of poison — a common cause of death for the delicate hawks.
