Left my apartment today with no particular hawk site in goal. It was too early to check the Cathedral unless I planned to hang around for a couple hours, but too late to go adventuring. Since there was a Starbucks on the route, I ended up deciding to head toward the Central Park Reservoir and see if either of the two hawks Bruce recently watched were around. They would be the juvenile missing its R4 tail feather and the "clockwork hawk" of 86th St.
By 5:10 I had been over to the Reservoir, walked down to the north end of the Great Lawn, but turned around to begin working back towards the Cathedral. (Too late to head over to the east side to check on Lola.) Walking alongside the loop road, I was up to about 88th St., and has just waved hi to a friend going the other way on his skates, when a hawk zoomed past on my left heading south. It zipped along the entire length of the "blasted plain" that was formerly the lawn just inside the park wall and into a tree by the 86th St. transverse. By the time I made my way down there, it had switched to another tree right alongside a park path.
Her (?) perch was no more than 15 feet off the ground and she seemed to care not a whit about the nearby folk taking pictures.
Instead she was doing the usual hawk routine of looking around.
But who is it? For some reason, perhaps the gray lighting, I first thought the tail looked brownish and so it was the juvenile. But no.
That tail looks red. It was even more apparent when I moved onto the park path and chatted with a couple of pedestrians, several of whom were whipping out camera phones.
But look at the tail closely. It seems that the dark bar near the tip of the tail feathers is not very heavy. Certainly not as heavy as I've seen in some of the other local hawks.
Her irises also look relatively light-colored, so it may be that she's just a couple years old. That might also explain the lack of a mate.
The scene along the path lasted just a bit more than five minutes before the red-tail decided to vacate, apparently because of gathering jays. She flew about a block northeast into trees near the Reservoir. I thought I saw her change positions once as I moved that way, but by the time I was in the area, there were plenty of jay complaints... but no hawk. In a few minutes the jays quieted down, but still no hawk.
Well, time to head north. Maybe the hawk has gone that way too. But aside from a glimpse of something large circling twice over Central Park West near 104th St. there were no more possible hawk sightings. No one in the Ravine, in the North Woods or on the Great Hill.
Walked into Morningside Park at 6:05 to see the light trucks are still parked up on Morningside Drive. Not much activity in the park. The geese are about, but there are only a few mallards. No sign of Tristan up around 116th St., although it's too early for him to be roosting anyway. Up to Morningside Drive at 6:20, no sign of a hawk in the Cathedral nest. It starts to rain just a tiny bit. At 6:30, the light trucks turn on the floodlights. The nest is better lit, but still no sign of a hawk. It starts to rain a bit harder. Time to vacate.
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