Dan Rodricks: Encounter with a city hawk, and hoping for the best

My barber saw a coyote in Lauraville and knows a woman who saw a white-tail deer in Remington. The Baltimore artist Jordan Tierney spotted two otters swimming in the Jones Falls in Mount Washington. Last summer, just downstream of where Tierney saw the otters, William Prestwich photographed a beaver. 

My dog discovered baby possums in our basement. I once saw a raccoon eat spinach tortellini from a trash can behind a house in Guilford. 

Patterson Park has become a regular stop for thousands of migratory birds, including — to the great excitement of bird nerds — the common gallinule.

Baltimoreans love to share stories of wildlife sightings. It’s a treat to see a red fox scamper across a city street, a bizarre thrill to see a murder of crows — hundreds of them — flying over Mount Vernon and Bolton Hill.

It can all seem natural and normal, especially in the greener areas of the city. Loss of habitat or changing environmental conditions influence animal behavior; they go where the food is, they seek leafy urban habitat because they’ve been pushed out of suburban and rural ones.

When a couple of raccoons showed up in a tree near my house, I assumed they were seeking a new home or looking to raid a bird nest for eggs.

But what happened the other day was more concerning.

A red-shouldered hawk showed up in my Baltimore driveway, about 15 feet from the kitchen door as I turned the key to lock it. I had never seen a hawk linger on the ground as this one did. That it did not quickly fly away, allowing me time to snap photographs, was odd.

While pleased to see a red-shouldered hawk up close, it bothered me. 

Hawks are commonly seen and heard — kee-rah! — in my city neighborhood, but usually they are high overhead, on the hunt for food. 

My feeder has been popular with songbirds and squirrels. We attract flocks of mourning doves. We have numerous urban rabbits, too. As a result, the yard has attracted prowling foxes and, from the sky, hawks. One of them once swooped into the yard and came within five feet of my nose as I walked out the kitchen door.

But this one, the hawk in my driveway, was unusual.

As I stepped slowly toward him, he walked away, through a hedge into my neighbor’s yard, and there he stood for several minutes. 

The hawk looked fine — to my eye, perfect. But he did not fly off, as I expected him to, so I assumed there was something wrong. “That’s not normal,” said two friends who have devoted years to birding.

Maybe the hawk had eaten something that made him ill. It’s possible, says Dave Brinker, avian conservation ecologist with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Maybe he had slammed into a window or moving car, though there was no obvious sign of injury.

It’s also possible he had been infected with the avian flu, the air-borne respiratory disease that has ravaged poultry stocks across the country, causing scarcity and increasing the price of eggs. The flu has also killed thousands of wild birds. 

And, even before the current outbreak, wild birds had been in decline. In 2020, the journal Science reported that the North American bird population had fallen by 3 billion, or roughly 30%, during the previous 50 years. The North American Bird Conservation Initiative reported that 70 species had lost half or more of their breeding populations.

The reasons are well established: Loss of habitat, widespread use of insecticides, bird collisions with reflective glass on houses, apartments and office buildings. 

And now the avian flu takes its toll.

Each day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture lists reported cases of wild bird infections. In Maryland, most have been on the Eastern Shore among waterfowl, but several bald eagles have been infected as well. Some cases have been reported in Baltimore.

“Wild birds can be infected … and show no signs of illness,” says the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. “They can carry the disease to new areas when migrating, potentially exposing domestic poultry to the virus.”

Anecdotal: Far fewer finches have been to my feeder this winter. 

Not anecdotal: A friend who lives near Chestertown, on the Eastern Shore, found and disposed of 50 dead turkey vultures on his riverfront property before he stopped counting them. In December, the Maryland Department of Agriculture confirmed the cause of death as avian influenza.

Avian flu, says DNR, “should be considered endemic throughout Maryland’s wild bird populations, especially waterfowl and raptors.”

Hawks are raptors. 

I watched the one that visited my home for a while — it walked under some shrubs, then across two neighbors’ yards — before I had to leave for an appointment. When I returned, there was no sign of it. 

I did some reading about this and spoke with Brinker, the DNR bird expert. While illness might explain the behavior of the hawk, he said, it’s also possible that the hawk lived most of its life in my neighborhood, or nearby, and, being accustomed to seeing human beings, did not scare off easily.

Of all possible explanations for the hawk being in the driveway, I hoped it was the one described as “resting after flying a long distance.”

I don’t know what grounded that gorgeous hawk, but I hope he recovered and soared off above the sycamores, where he belongs. I hope, for the hawk’s sake, I never see it up so close again.