east from the parking lot on the Marshall Valley trail. Once we came close to the trees
we kept hearing this bird calling -- 2 notes repeated several times. It only appeared to be
a single bird and kept following us. It did not sound like any bird that I was familiar with.
We kept looking when we heard it calling. Finally we spotted an adult Red-tailed Hawk in
one of the Ponderosas. It kept calling. By this time we were not far from a known Red-tail
nest and we searched for the nest and found a large tribe of magpies in the nest tree. We
did not find the nest because of all the foliage. Was the hawk calling to warn others about
the magpies? We continued to hear it as we climbed the mesa.
Has anyone heard a Red-tail give this type of call? Or this type of behavior?
The Wheeler book of Raptors of Western NA says that adults emit a raspy squeal chee-ack or Chee-aah
at any time of year. That could possibly be what this hawk was calling but it was not raspy enough for
me to recognize it as coming from a hawk until we saw the hawk calling. I searched Xeno Canto and could
not find anything similar.
Joyce Takamine
Boulder
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