In late August I kept driving by Piedmont Farm and seeing this red tailed hawk sitting on the fence watching the cars go by. She’d be out there rain or shine. Finally one day I just decided to slow down and take a look at her. I wasn’t quite certain, but she seemed to have leather jesses on her legs and it looked like she was blind in one eye. She flew off as I approached, but the next time I drove by there she was again looking miserable.
Thinking that she was an escaped falconry bird, I called Lois and Paul Napier of the Washington Metropolitan Raptor Society. They had been at the farm a few years back to tag and photograph our white hawk. I told them I thought there was an escaped bird hanging around out here and they said they’d stop by as soon as they could.
It was rainy Saturday morning when they arrived – and of course the hawk was nowhere to be found. Just as they were ready to give up, we saw a red tailed hawk in a tree. We couldn’t be sure if it was the same bird, but they laid out the traps and we waited. and waited. and waited. Again, just as they were ready to call it a day, she swooped down from a tree and got ensnared in the trap. Sure enough, it was a bird that was blind in one eye and wearing leather jesses.
She was as thin as a rail and once she was on Lois’s fist, she was more than happy to eat a few mice offered to her (she ate 5 of them on the way home to the Raptor Conservancy of Virginia). For a brief moment (about 10 minutes) I nursed a fantasy of taking up falconry and keeping her. The reality of feeding a partially blind hawk (and the two year apprentice program for a falconry permit) soon changed my mind.
A little bit of research determined that she had gotten loose from a nature center where she was used as an “education” bird (being partially blind meant that she couldn’t hunt on her own in the wild). The Napiers nursed her back to health and then turned her over to the center once again.
