Help us win a new car to make an even bigger difference!

Hawks Aloft is proud to announce we’ve been selected as a finalist in Toyota’s 100 Cars for Good Program. Now we need your support!

Tell your friends and vote for Hawks Aloft at www.100carsforgood.com on July 28.

Toyota’s 100 Cars for Good program will be awarding 100 vehicles to 100 nonprofits over the course of 100 days based on votes from the public. A total of 500 nonprofits were selected from more than 4,000 applications nationwide. We are hoping to win a new Highlander to help purchase an Avian Ambulance to transport injured raptors and other birds throughout New Mexico, transport educational birds to school programs, and transport avian biologists into the field for research.

Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)

Along the river, an Ash-throated Flycatcher (Myiarchus cinerascens) heralds his return to spring breeding grounds. Seen in Corrales Bosque on 4/18/2012.

Our new Harlan’s Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis harlani) arrived yesterday afternoon and was safely ensconced in his new Porter Palace before dinnertime.

Chellye has been a volunteer with Hawks Aloft for about 8 years now and has trained and housed our female red-tail, Aguililla. For now, Harlan lives alone in the big flight so he can get settled in and so Chellye can work with him one on one. Then, we plan to reintroduce Lilla to the mews. By the time we left last night, he was exploring every corner of his cage. The biggest thrill came when he discovered he could fly the length of the cage from the low perch to the high perch. Back and forth he went, never missing a wingbeat. The view from his new home is rural farmland with chickens and horses. There is even a kestrel pair setting up in the cottonwood tree about 80 feet away. We are beyond thrilled to add him to our cadre of educational ambassadors.

Also new to the Porter family menagerie, and arriving on the same day, were four kittens. The pregnant female that they had rescued just a couple of weeks ago gave birth under daughter, Lindsey’s, bed. Never a dull moment in the Porter house.

Many thanks to Laurin and Louise at the Cascades Raptor Center for thinking of us first when deciding to place him and for assisting us through the maze of paperwork. We also extend a huge thank you to the Porters!!!

Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura)

Meet our youngest Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicencis).
She was hatched in 2009. Found as a recently fledged youngster with a severely swollen left eye, her left eye did have to be surgically removed. However, she is fully flighted and is often one of our more difficult birds to control. At outreach events or classroom programs, she is usually presented on the glove so her handler has better control of her when she bates (attempts to fly off). At the Festival of the Cranes in Monte Vista, CO, she sat atop her travel box, which was weighted down with a brick, all weekend long. Her ever increasing calmness is a reflection of the great job her trainer has done.

She acquired her adult tail feathers in the summer of 2010. To our surprise, all of her plumage got darker and she is now nearly a rufous morph.

At 23 years young, she is far and away the best foster parent of all of our educational birds. In fact, she lives for babies! Initially, we thought she was a male bird. That is, until she laid her first egg.

She’s been a stalwart, proven education bird, among the easiest to handle, even for newbie volunteers. She can be counted on to sit on her travel box at an outreach booth for the entire day, snoozing throughout much of it. In short, her pleasant personality makes her a favorite with the staff and also with the volunteers. However, it seems that, in her mind at least, educating the public is just part of her job, boredom personified, as she sits all day long while an adoring public watches.
Each winter, usually around the holidays, she begins checking out the remnants of her previous year’s nest, moving the ever-present sticks (that we provide) around, skulking in the corner near the nest, and laying in it. We always hold out until mid-March before providing nesting materials in earnest because we know that, once the cycle starts, she won’t have to appear again in public until July, at the earliest. And so it goes! She is hard at work on her 2012 nest now, carefully arranging the green branches that Gail provides daily. Before April’s end, she will have laid 2-3 whitish eggs, which she will incubate, apparently endlessly. Without a mate, her eggs are infertile (in case you are wondering, she has rebuffed any and all companions in her expansive mews – except for babies). Thus, she is dependent on the arrival of an orphan to fulfill her biological cycle of motherhood. So far, she’s reared orphaned Red-tailed Hawks, Harris’ Hawks, and Swainson’s Hawks, that sometimes arrive when they are only a few days old. It is an important job, and one that she takes very seriously. The babies often are delivered by Wildlife Rescue or the Wildlife Center.

While we don’t wish ill on any of the nests of wild birds, it is a very sad year indeed, when no orphans arrive in need of a mom! It is her mission. She is so dedicated that once the chicks near fledging age, they must be taken to a rehab center to attend “mouse school” and practice flight skills in a huge flight. We once tried to put live mice into her cage so the young could acquire predation practice. Instead, she ran around and quickly killed everything in there, making sure there were no threats to that year’s young.

To the right is one of the chicks she reared in 2010. No babies arrived in 2011. We will keep you posted if any new babies arrive in 2012.

Say’s Phoebe (Sayornis saya)

Spring is in the air and the first hummingbird migrants are back in town. It is time to put your feeders out!

Did you know…?
The Black-chinned Hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri) is the most common breeding bird in the Middle Rio Grande bosque.