Interview with John Blakeman - Part 2

Pip feeds herself May 30, 2011 had a lot of trouble and gave up - exhausted! (Violet did come back to help her, so the poor baby didn't starve! It was quite a site to see!

Important Answers about the NYU Red-Tailed Hawk nest from John Blakeman

We see Pip wandering around so loosely and hazardously on the nest. Won’t she fall out and die when crashing on the concrete below? As much as the eyass’s staggering around on this high nest appears ominous, it’s not. Red-tailed hawks have been growing up — and staggering around on these high nests — for millennia. Instinctively, the little hawks do not (normally) get too close to the nest or ledge edge and topple over into the air. Have faith. The instinctive neuromuscular circuits of the little bird prevent it from falling out. There will be times, especially toward the end, when the eyass is learning to flap it’s incomplete wings that is will look like it will certainly fall out. But it won’t. Just hold your breath and watch the spectacle, having faith in the genes, muscles, neurons, brain, and instincts of the bird. All will be well.

Pip disappeared for a while. Where’d she go? The nest, the pile of sticks, rests in the corner of a wide ledge. Pip, like little human kids, will want to climb off the nest and “go exploring” out to the left. There, she will learn valuable walking lessons that she can’t if confined to the nest proper. As she grows up, she will spend more time out on the ledge, just as a little toddler might spend time walking around out the yard or living room, not just its bedroom.

Will Bobby & Violet come back to the nest after Pip is fledged and has flown away? No, as this would presume that the nest is the hawk’s home. It is not, by any means. Regard the nest (as the hawks do) as only a nursery, a place to incubate eggs and raise the eyasses to fledge.
Violet spends the night on the nest (at least for the first few weeks), but only to protect her eyass, and to sit on the unhatched eggs. The nest is not Violet’s home, and she does not regard it as such.

Well then, what is the home of Bobby & Violet? It’s their entire territory, all of Washington Square Park and all of the surrounding neighborhoods. They will drive out any interloping red-tail that flies into the defended territory. In rural areas red-tails commonly have defended territories of about 2 square miles. It’s where they spend virtually all of their time and do all of their hunting. The nest will be somewhere in the territory. But the territories of urban red-tails are much smaller, because the density of prey (rats, squirrels, pigeons) is much greater. No need to defend such a large area.

It would be wonderful, and biologically helpful if a group of interested Washington Square Park hawk-watchers would create a “dot map,” putting a dot on a map of the area showing every place Bobby and Violet have ever been seen perching. After a few weeks of this, their territory is indicated by the dots.
　

Watch for Part 3 Coming Soon!

Saidhbhin