Another go at this....

Cooper's Hawk nest high in the tree.

Here we go again.  I  decided that I am going to take another shot at imprinting another Cooper's Hawk.  Last summer I gave it a shot but the bird died unexpectantly about two weeks before being fully summed and after necropsy and tests there was no conclusion as to why he died.  Read more here.

Little closer shot

So I have been looking forward to giving it another shot this year.  Last year it was almost too easy to find a nest.  Basically I saw and adult fly into the woods and Daniel and I stumbled onto it within a couple of minutes of searching.  This year was different.  Many of the nests that we had found last year drew a blank this year. We (mostly Daniel) did find several active nests, mainly in the Tulsa metro area, and have been watching them for the past month or so.  By metro area I mean right in the middle of the darn city.  The majority of nests were WAY up in sycamore trees and in people's front and back yards.  Not the best for climbing without drawing attention to yourself.   

Monkey me up the tree

We did go back to a nest that was shown to us by a friend last year that was deep in the woods.  We found that this nest was active and it just happened to be in a very picturesque section of forest.  Also the tree is a hackberry tree which is a whole lot safer to climb than the brittle sycamores the other nests are in.  So it was decided that this was probably going to be the one.

Rappelling down with the "cargo"

We first climbed the nest on April 27th just to see how things were coming along.  In the nest we found four eggs and knew were were in business.  Then came the waiting game.

Daniel the "safety supervisor"

We kept a close eye on the city nests which were much quicker to check than the wooded nest.  In fact, Daniel had one just blocks from his house that we could see without even getting out of the car.  Last week we finally saw adults feeding babies, along with slices all around below the nest and knew is was time to head on back.

~2 day old chicks

So we headed back out to the woods only to find the female sitting on the nest and no slices below the tree.  Hmmmm...This was not looking good now.  After some quick math we decided that if the nest was still alive then there would have to be babies at this point.  So I put on the tree spikes and headed up the 40 or so feet of tree trunk to the nest.  The mother didn't leave the nest until I was about 4 feet below her and that got me thinking that I was just gonna see eggs.  Luckily I'm wrong from time to time, because when I scaled the last several feet and peeked over the edge of the nest I found several young Cooper's Hawks staring back at me!

Still sweating from the climb an hour earlier.

The birds had hatched but they were only a day or two old and that explains why we didn't see a lot of Coop poop at the base of the tree.  These birds were a little younger than I would have liked but I wasn't to psyched to climb that tree again so I decided I would put in the time it takes to get a young bird going.  So with the help of Daniel and fellow Oklahoma falconer Glen Bernard, I ended up pulling two birds of the four that were in the nest (Ok falconry regs state that two birds must be left in the nest) and Glen and I are the proud new austringers in the state this year.

I have the same plan for this bird as I did for the last one.  After it is close to being hard penned I'm going tame hack it at work for a month or two and see what happens.  I have high hopes for dog and bird working together this falconry season.