Thank you! This is a juvenile red-shouldered hawk. In 2023 the hawks built a nest too close to the trail. I could watch it from the trail, but I was a little closer to the nest than was good, but I did go over several times, and figured the mother would get used to seeing me, and so would the chicks. When I’m watching a nest and other people come along, I always look somewhere else, pretend I’m photographing the creek or something; as far as I know, no one else saw the nest (and it isn’t particularly a well-traveled part of the trail; the trail has two branches along here, and doesn’t see a lot of people on either), but this is a species of hawk that gets pretty loud while still in the nest. (The red-shouldered hawk has a scream much like that of the red-tailed hawk–which is used in movies when they want to have an eagle calling, because it’s louder than the eagle’s call–and the young start doing that call while still in the nest, to my surprise.) The city did some work along this trail early last year, and I think they took down the nest tree. This species often reuses a nest, but I didn’t know where the nest was in 2024.
One day in summer 2024 I was walking this trail, and in the background I started hearing the call of a hawk. For a while I was focused on other things, but then it occurred to me it could be a juvenile, because they’d probably be nesting again in the same vicinity and it was about time for them to be out of the nest, so I decided to walk toward the call. Eventually the sound was quite loud and I looked up and realized this youngster was directly over my head. (I did get quite a good photo of it screaming and looking straight toward me.) After a minute or two it flew to a different tree, then quickly another, and it landed in this one and stayed there. It continued to scream–it was hungry and wanted its parents to know that and do something about it, and now.
After taking some photos, and a really brief video of the screaming (I’ll try to link it below), I walked on. When I came back down the trail, it had a rabbit but it was still screaming. Then its parent flew in and left again, and it started eating. My hunch is that a parent brought it food, but didn’t “open” it, and so its parent came in and opened the catch. My husband has sometimes spoken of young robins or bluebirds as “lazy” because they’ll squawk for food and their parents will come over and pick up food right at their feet and give it to them. But here is the reality: a bird freshly out of the nest is just weeks old, maybe less than two weeks old in the case of a songbird. This hawk will be a few weeks old, but less than two months. It has grown into adult shape, and it has learned to fly. Now it needs to know how to keep away from danger, where to find shelter, and how to hunt–and that’s a lot to learn. So parents continue to feed it, and as they do so it learns how to find it for itself.
From Indiana Audubon: “Young leave the nest at about 6 weeks of age. Not much is known about the immature stage but parents may continue to feed them for 8-10 weeks after fledging. Enjoy these beautiful hawks and watch for them near wet areas. In spring you are likely to hear them before you see them!”
Thank you! This is a juvenile red-shouldered hawk. In 2023 the hawks built a nest too close to the trail. I could watch it from the trail, but I was a little closer to the nest than was good, but I did go over several times, and figured the mother would get used to seeing me, and so would the chicks. When I’m watching a nest and other people come along, I always look somewhere else, pretend I’m photographing the creek or something; as far as I know, no one else saw the nest (and it isn’t particularly a well-traveled part of the trail; the trail has two branches along here, and doesn’t see a lot of people on either), but this is a species of hawk that gets pretty loud while still in the nest. (The red-shouldered hawk has a scream much like that of the red-tailed hawk–which is used in movies when they want to have an eagle calling, because it’s louder than the eagle’s call–and the young start doing that call while still in the nest, to my surprise.) The city did some work along this trail early last year, and I think they took down the nest tree. This species often reuses a nest, but I didn’t know where the nest was in 2024.
One day in summer 2024 I was walking this trail, and in the background I started hearing the call of a hawk. For a while I was focused on other things, but then it occurred to me it could be a juvenile, because they’d probably be nesting again in the same vicinity and it was about time for them to be out of the nest, so I decided to walk toward the call. Eventually the sound was quite loud and I looked up and realized this youngster was directly over my head. (I did get quite a good photo of it screaming and looking straight toward me.) After a minute or two it flew to a different tree, then quickly another, and it landed in this one and stayed there. It continued to scream–it was hungry and wanted its parents to know that and do something about it, and now.
After taking some photos, and a really brief video of the screaming (I’ll try to link it below), I walked on. When I came back down the trail, it had a rabbit but it was still screaming. Then its parent flew in and left again, and it started eating. My hunch is that a parent brought it food, but didn’t “open” it, and so its parent came in and opened the catch. My husband has sometimes spoken of young robins or bluebirds as “lazy” because they’ll squawk for food and their parents will come over and pick up food right at their feet and give it to them. But here is the reality: a bird freshly out of the nest is just weeks old, maybe less than two weeks old in the case of a songbird. This hawk will be a few weeks old, but less than two months. It has grown into adult shape, and it has learned to fly. Now it needs to know how to keep away from danger, where to find shelter, and how to hunt–and that’s a lot to learn. So parents continue to feed it, and as they do so it learns how to find it for itself.
From Indiana Audubon: “Young leave the nest at about 6 weeks of age. Not much is known about the immature stage but parents may continue to feed them for 8-10 weeks after fledging. Enjoy these beautiful hawks and watch for them near wet areas. In spring you are likely to hear them before you see them!”
As to the juror comments, the man kept calling it an eagle and said we can’t see what the eagle is looking at, as though that were maybe a weakness of the shot. So I finally spoke up and said it’s a juvenile hawk screaming for food. (In other words, it’s not really “looking at” anything.)
They also said the bird is too centered in the photo, that I should have cropped out some of the material on the left; that’s a legitimate criticism, although I had already tried that and didn’t like the results as well. They didn’t like the overly bright patches among the leaves, and they’re right–that’s the only part of the photo I don’t like either. But the woman said the leaves should be brighter in color (I disagree; they’re background, and that’s the color they were), that it would have been better to have moved a little to the right so that the one large limb is hidden behind the other. (That might work or it might not; truth is with wildlife photography, you definitely need to pay attention to the background, but you do so without spooking the animal, and this one was actually already in a good setting, except for the bright patches.)
They told me which branches to crop out along the right side; I’m disinclined to do that, as I don’t agree they’re too distracting and I prefer photographing nature as it is (as long as there isn’t a branch immediately above the bird’s head or something). They also told me the bird is too dark and too close to the color of the branches, which is actually kind of the point–God gave it camouflage.
Someone in the photography club then started talking and saying that the key to wildlife photography (which, by the way, he doesn’t actually photograph) is to really know the area well and to take lots and lots of photos, and I wanted to say, “Exactly! That’s why I was able to take this really good photo of a juvenile hawk, because I know this trail well, know this species, even know the parents of this youngster!”
The funny thing to me was that in leading up to the exhibit, the committee kept telling us that the jurors had a really hard job to do, because there were more than 200 photos to choose from, and they were mostly really good photos and they had to narrow it down to 80. So I thoroughly expected them to look at this photo (and maybe some of the others) and say, “This is an excellent photo, and we actually wanted to choose it, but it has this and this imperfection,” or “we would have had too many bird photos.” But they said not one word about the photo being good or interesting in any way. I took thousands of bird photos last year, including a hummingbird making her nest, an osprey in flight over her nest, and a great blue heron just returning to its nest with a stick–and this was my favorite bird shot of the year. But the jurors didn’t bother saying, “This is actually a really good shot” or even “This could be a great shot with these tweaks.” Now, the purpose of their speaking to us was to tell us “why it wasn’t accepted for the exhibit,” and of course that means the focus is on “why it didn’t work,” but if it was really almost good enough, or was mostly a good photo, it really is a good idea to say so. As it was, I worried that newer members of the club would see the discussion start with this photo, and the one of my frozen waterfall, and hear only what was wrong with both photos, and be discouraged at impossible standards.
Oh, and the male juror said at one point, “This looks like a documentary photo,” and he said it as though it were an insult. But since a lot of my purpose of photography is to document what I see (this is what it looks like when a fledgling hawk screams for its parents to bring it food), my thought was, “OK, then the question is, does it WORK as a documentary photo?”
To me it “works” as a documentary photo. You can see nearly all of the “field marks” of a juvenile red-shouldered hawk: eye color, barring on the bird’s front, head and wing markings, and so forth. You see it perched in a natural setting, and it’s an action photo but it’s in focus. It’s not a perfect photo, those patches of bright color are distracting, but I really like it, and I plan to resubmit it next year.
Nice photo and interesting information, Cheryl. The community my husband lived in the for longest time is now a major birding area. The residents get irritated by those who carelessly park and block roads or who go on private land to get those good shots. However, it is also nice to have lots of boardwalk trails into the bog. It is called the Sax-Zim Bog Birding Area. Apparently, there is quite the owl irruption going on right now all around us.
I do miss having a feeder ourselves. My husband took it down, because so many around us had bears bothering them. We never had a problem with those, however. The recommendation is to wait until November and take down by April, I believe.
We are off to the third day in a row of music. I am so glad it is warm. We will plunge into the deep cold beginning tomorrow, as will many of you, I am sure. Minus 40’s windchills will keep us in for church, too. We no longer go out in those unless it is terribly important. I have plenty to do at any rate. We will watch our church service online. That is a blessing.
Good morning, all. A beautiful day here. Sadly, brother heads home today. It was nice to have other brother down from Moscow yesterday. He is suffering from herniated discs, one of which is pressing on the nerve so lots of pain the past couple of months. He got the shot last week, marginal improvement.
Well I think that’s a great shot! Those comments would be discouraging, what about the (good) idea that something positive should be included when one’s “job” or assignment is to be critical? Good editors all practice that; we humans need to be encouraged (which, in turn, will help us take criticism well, to better see and use it as something instructive, designed to help us).
Your photo today did remind me of a story I wanted to follow up on — the state transportation agency will need to close our port bridge (heavily used by the port but also by all of us, it’s our main connector to the neighboring city of Long Beach) to replace the roadway. It’s only a mile long, opened in 1963, emerald green span that’s somewhat iconic to the area now, often seen on TV and in films.
The anticipated 16-month closure will be a huge disruption – but the other part of that story I wanted to follow up on is a protected nest that’s on the bridge and will have to be moved or somehow dealt with.
We’ve had state protected-status nests on the bridge in the past that needed moving for painting or other jobs — last time it was a peregrine falcon nest and I did story on that job. It took me to the consultant they’d hired in Northern California who turned out to be a classmate of mine from elementary school (and he was into birds even back then!). Fun to interview him.
Anyway, I let the state contact know I would be interested in focusing on this part of the bridge story if she could put me in touch with someone handling that. (I’m quite sure my friend is now retired, ran into him again at USC when a bunch of us gathered for an elementary school class ‘reunion’ right before the pandemic hit; our teacher now is a professor there and someone thought it would be fun to gather and honor her.)
Photo editor asked today if the nest is visible with a long lens, I told him I’d check on that too.
Meanwhile, it’s Friday. Yay.
Spotted one of our recent editorial board opinions online titled: “Fires likely to incinerate the career of Karen Bass” –
We had late daytime temps in the high (+) 50s yesterday and I thought that was chilly.
Sorry to hear about the back pain your one brother is experiencing, mumsee. Sometimes I think to myself, no wonder the adults always looked and moved so strangely sometimes when I was still a flexible kid.
Our church service is cancelled on Sunday. That is rare, but the pastor does have a fairly long drive to get to the church. I think it is a wise decision.
Wandering Views 
I think the hawk is telling us: “It’s Friday! And you know what that means!“
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Nice shot, by the way.
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Thank you! This is a juvenile red-shouldered hawk. In 2023 the hawks built a nest too close to the trail. I could watch it from the trail, but I was a little closer to the nest than was good, but I did go over several times, and figured the mother would get used to seeing me, and so would the chicks. When I’m watching a nest and other people come along, I always look somewhere else, pretend I’m photographing the creek or something; as far as I know, no one else saw the nest (and it isn’t particularly a well-traveled part of the trail; the trail has two branches along here, and doesn’t see a lot of people on either), but this is a species of hawk that gets pretty loud while still in the nest. (The red-shouldered hawk has a scream much like that of the red-tailed hawk–which is used in movies when they want to have an eagle calling, because it’s louder than the eagle’s call–and the young start doing that call while still in the nest, to my surprise.) The city did some work along this trail early last year, and I think they took down the nest tree. This species often reuses a nest, but I didn’t know where the nest was in 2024.
One day in summer 2024 I was walking this trail, and in the background I started hearing the call of a hawk. For a while I was focused on other things, but then it occurred to me it could be a juvenile, because they’d probably be nesting again in the same vicinity and it was about time for them to be out of the nest, so I decided to walk toward the call. Eventually the sound was quite loud and I looked up and realized this youngster was directly over my head. (I did get quite a good photo of it screaming and looking straight toward me.) After a minute or two it flew to a different tree, then quickly another, and it landed in this one and stayed there. It continued to scream–it was hungry and wanted its parents to know that and do something about it, and now.
After taking some photos, and a really brief video of the screaming (I’ll try to link it below), I walked on. When I came back down the trail, it had a rabbit but it was still screaming. Then its parent flew in and left again, and it started eating. My hunch is that a parent brought it food, but didn’t “open” it, and so its parent came in and opened the catch. My husband has sometimes spoken of young robins or bluebirds as “lazy” because they’ll squawk for food and their parents will come over and pick up food right at their feet and give it to them. But here is the reality: a bird freshly out of the nest is just weeks old, maybe less than two weeks old in the case of a songbird. This hawk will be a few weeks old, but less than two months. It has grown into adult shape, and it has learned to fly. Now it needs to know how to keep away from danger, where to find shelter, and how to hunt–and that’s a lot to learn. So parents continue to feed it, and as they do so it learns how to find it for itself.
From Indiana Audubon: “Young leave the nest at about 6 weeks of age. Not much is known about the immature stage but parents may continue to feed them for 8-10 weeks after fledging. Enjoy these beautiful hawks and watch for them near wet areas. In spring you are likely to hear them before you see them!”
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Thank you! This is a juvenile red-shouldered hawk. In 2023 the hawks built a nest too close to the trail. I could watch it from the trail, but I was a little closer to the nest than was good, but I did go over several times, and figured the mother would get used to seeing me, and so would the chicks. When I’m watching a nest and other people come along, I always look somewhere else, pretend I’m photographing the creek or something; as far as I know, no one else saw the nest (and it isn’t particularly a well-traveled part of the trail; the trail has two branches along here, and doesn’t see a lot of people on either), but this is a species of hawk that gets pretty loud while still in the nest. (The red-shouldered hawk has a scream much like that of the red-tailed hawk–which is used in movies when they want to have an eagle calling, because it’s louder than the eagle’s call–and the young start doing that call while still in the nest, to my surprise.) The city did some work along this trail early last year, and I think they took down the nest tree. This species often reuses a nest, but I didn’t know where the nest was in 2024.
One day in summer 2024 I was walking this trail, and in the background I started hearing the call of a hawk. For a while I was focused on other things, but then it occurred to me it could be a juvenile, because they’d probably be nesting again in the same vicinity and it was about time for them to be out of the nest, so I decided to walk toward the call. Eventually the sound was quite loud and I looked up and realized this youngster was directly over my head. (I did get quite a good photo of it screaming and looking straight toward me.) After a minute or two it flew to a different tree, then quickly another, and it landed in this one and stayed there. It continued to scream–it was hungry and wanted its parents to know that and do something about it, and now.
After taking some photos, and a really brief video of the screaming (I’ll try to link it below), I walked on. When I came back down the trail, it had a rabbit but it was still screaming. Then its parent flew in and left again, and it started eating. My hunch is that a parent brought it food, but didn’t “open” it, and so its parent came in and opened the catch. My husband has sometimes spoken of young robins or bluebirds as “lazy” because they’ll squawk for food and their parents will come over and pick up food right at their feet and give it to them. But here is the reality: a bird freshly out of the nest is just weeks old, maybe less than two weeks old in the case of a songbird. This hawk will be a few weeks old, but less than two months. It has grown into adult shape, and it has learned to fly. Now it needs to know how to keep away from danger, where to find shelter, and how to hunt–and that’s a lot to learn. So parents continue to feed it, and as they do so it learns how to find it for itself.
From Indiana Audubon: “Young leave the nest at about 6 weeks of age. Not much is known about the immature stage but parents may continue to feed them for 8-10 weeks after fledging. Enjoy these beautiful hawks and watch for them near wet areas. In spring you are likely to hear them before you see them!”
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This is a three-second video if you don’t know what the call of the red-shouldered hawk sounds like. This juvenile, on this tree: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cherylmolin/53805407591/in/album-72177720321872715
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As to the juror comments, the man kept calling it an eagle and said we can’t see what the eagle is looking at, as though that were maybe a weakness of the shot. So I finally spoke up and said it’s a juvenile hawk screaming for food. (In other words, it’s not really “looking at” anything.)
They also said the bird is too centered in the photo, that I should have cropped out some of the material on the left; that’s a legitimate criticism, although I had already tried that and didn’t like the results as well. They didn’t like the overly bright patches among the leaves, and they’re right–that’s the only part of the photo I don’t like either. But the woman said the leaves should be brighter in color (I disagree; they’re background, and that’s the color they were), that it would have been better to have moved a little to the right so that the one large limb is hidden behind the other. (That might work or it might not; truth is with wildlife photography, you definitely need to pay attention to the background, but you do so without spooking the animal, and this one was actually already in a good setting, except for the bright patches.)
They told me which branches to crop out along the right side; I’m disinclined to do that, as I don’t agree they’re too distracting and I prefer photographing nature as it is (as long as there isn’t a branch immediately above the bird’s head or something). They also told me the bird is too dark and too close to the color of the branches, which is actually kind of the point–God gave it camouflage.
Someone in the photography club then started talking and saying that the key to wildlife photography (which, by the way, he doesn’t actually photograph) is to really know the area well and to take lots and lots of photos, and I wanted to say, “Exactly! That’s why I was able to take this really good photo of a juvenile hawk, because I know this trail well, know this species, even know the parents of this youngster!”
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The funny thing to me was that in leading up to the exhibit, the committee kept telling us that the jurors had a really hard job to do, because there were more than 200 photos to choose from, and they were mostly really good photos and they had to narrow it down to 80. So I thoroughly expected them to look at this photo (and maybe some of the others) and say, “This is an excellent photo, and we actually wanted to choose it, but it has this and this imperfection,” or “we would have had too many bird photos.” But they said not one word about the photo being good or interesting in any way. I took thousands of bird photos last year, including a hummingbird making her nest, an osprey in flight over her nest, and a great blue heron just returning to its nest with a stick–and this was my favorite bird shot of the year. But the jurors didn’t bother saying, “This is actually a really good shot” or even “This could be a great shot with these tweaks.” Now, the purpose of their speaking to us was to tell us “why it wasn’t accepted for the exhibit,” and of course that means the focus is on “why it didn’t work,” but if it was really almost good enough, or was mostly a good photo, it really is a good idea to say so. As it was, I worried that newer members of the club would see the discussion start with this photo, and the one of my frozen waterfall, and hear only what was wrong with both photos, and be discouraged at impossible standards.
Oh, and the male juror said at one point, “This looks like a documentary photo,” and he said it as though it were an insult. But since a lot of my purpose of photography is to document what I see (this is what it looks like when a fledgling hawk screams for its parents to bring it food), my thought was, “OK, then the question is, does it WORK as a documentary photo?”
To me it “works” as a documentary photo. You can see nearly all of the “field marks” of a juvenile red-shouldered hawk: eye color, barring on the bird’s front, head and wing markings, and so forth. You see it perched in a natural setting, and it’s an action photo but it’s in focus. It’s not a perfect photo, those patches of bright color are distracting, but I really like it, and I plan to resubmit it next year.
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Nice photo and interesting information, Cheryl. The community my husband lived in the for longest time is now a major birding area. The residents get irritated by those who carelessly park and block roads or who go on private land to get those good shots. However, it is also nice to have lots of boardwalk trails into the bog. It is called the Sax-Zim Bog Birding Area. Apparently, there is quite the owl irruption going on right now all around us.
I do miss having a feeder ourselves. My husband took it down, because so many around us had bears bothering them. We never had a problem with those, however. The recommendation is to wait until November and take down by April, I believe.
We are off to the third day in a row of music. I am so glad it is warm. We will plunge into the deep cold beginning tomorrow, as will many of you, I am sure. Minus 40’s windchills will keep us in for church, too. We no longer go out in those unless it is terribly important. I have plenty to do at any rate. We will watch our church service online. That is a blessing.
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Good morning, all. A beautiful day here. Sadly, brother heads home today. It was nice to have other brother down from Moscow yesterday. He is suffering from herniated discs, one of which is pressing on the nerve so lots of pain the past couple of months. He got the shot last week, marginal improvement.
mumsee
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Well I think that’s a great shot! Those comments would be discouraging, what about the (good) idea that something positive should be included when one’s “job” or assignment is to be critical? Good editors all practice that; we humans need to be encouraged (which, in turn, will help us take criticism well, to better see and use it as something instructive, designed to help us).
Your photo today did remind me of a story I wanted to follow up on — the state transportation agency will need to close our port bridge (heavily used by the port but also by all of us, it’s our main connector to the neighboring city of Long Beach) to replace the roadway. It’s only a mile long, opened in 1963, emerald green span that’s somewhat iconic to the area now, often seen on TV and in films.
The anticipated 16-month closure will be a huge disruption – but the other part of that story I wanted to follow up on is a protected nest that’s on the bridge and will have to be moved or somehow dealt with.
We’ve had state protected-status nests on the bridge in the past that needed moving for painting or other jobs — last time it was a peregrine falcon nest and I did story on that job. It took me to the consultant they’d hired in Northern California who turned out to be a classmate of mine from elementary school (and he was into birds even back then!). Fun to interview him.
Anyway, I let the state contact know I would be interested in focusing on this part of the bridge story if she could put me in touch with someone handling that. (I’m quite sure my friend is now retired, ran into him again at USC when a bunch of us gathered for an elementary school class ‘reunion’ right before the pandemic hit; our teacher now is a professor there and someone thought it would be fun to gather and honor her.)
Photo editor asked today if the nest is visible with a long lens, I told him I’d check on that too.
Meanwhile, it’s Friday. Yay.
Spotted one of our recent editorial board opinions online titled: “Fires likely to incinerate the career of Karen Bass” –
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Minus 40s — well that’s cold.
We had late daytime temps in the high (+) 50s yesterday and I thought that was chilly.
Sorry to hear about the back pain your one brother is experiencing, mumsee. Sometimes I think to myself, no wonder the adults always looked and moved so strangely sometimes when I was still a flexible kid.
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Good afternoon. Busy day here. I do really like that hawk photo. I haven’t had a chance to read all the comments yet.
I have been trying to listen to some podcasts on 31 days of wisdom, going through the Proverbs. That has taken up a lot of my onl8ne time.
Time to make hay since the day is almost gone. Such short hours of daylight.
It’s up near 60° today. The water main got repaired but it was still ‘boil water’ for those affected.
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Our church service is cancelled on Sunday. That is rare, but the pastor does have a fairly long drive to get to the church. I think it is a wise decision.
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Good morning, all, another beautiful day here. A cozy twenty four and cloudy.
mumsee
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