Bald Eagles Have Adopted a Baby Hawk in the Bay Area

Photographer Doug Gillard witnessed the first fuzzy baby hawk arrive—and at first assumed it was dinner for the eaglet.

by Kate Golden

June 15, 2023

The female bald eagle arrived suddenly, swooping low over wildlife photographer Doug Gillard, just as he was on his way back to his car from five hours of watching the nest in mid-May. In her talons, she clutched a fuzzy, light-gray baby bird—alive.

Dinner for the much larger young eaglet, Gillard assumed. He’d been shooting the nest since January, mostly by himself, watching “Lola,” as he nicknamed it (after his granddaughter), hatch and grow. “Nature can be cruel!” he wrote in a May 20 post to a Facebook group of birders, posting pictures of the eagle flying with what turned out to be a red-tailed hawk. “I’ve heard that BEs [bald eagles] will rob nests to feed their young, but this is the first time I’ve photographed it.” (Gillard was well-equipped; he runs a camera-review YouTube channel called “Let’s Go Birding.”)

When Gillard came back a week later, he saw “just a little tiny head poking out” over the nest. The eyas (the term for a baby hawk) was still alive. He nicknamed it “Tuffy,” given the ordeal it had survived. Gillard’s video shows the bald eagle parent feeding the chick.

“A week later, another little white flash caught my eye,” Gillard says. A second eyas.

Eaglet and two young hawks.

“I think you can definitely call this confirmed,” wrote Katie LaBarbera of the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, noting how thoroughly Gillard had documented the situation. Normally, hawks and eagles don’t mix. Yet eagles have been known to raise red-tailed hawks occasionally (plus at least one glaucous-winged gull chick, in the Aleutian Islands). Academic papers are few on such interspecific adoptions; one 1993 Journal of Raptor Research paper noted that 3 of 662 eagle pairs raised mixed broods in observations over 1987–1991. A National Geographic video from 2015 shows a hawk raised by eagles that grew up to act, in some ways, like an eagle.

more:

https://baynature.org/2023/06/15/bald-eagles-have-adopted-a-baby-hawk-in-the-bay-area/