He’s going down.

He’s going in.

Now’s the critical time.

That’s an impressive meat hook right there.

Most raptors at one level or another are adapting to urban environments throughout the world really.

Gray hawk is still a rare bird in the U.S. We can tell he was electrocuted by the two points of contact.

We understand that there’s an inherent hazard with our equipment.

We’re trying to rubber up everything that that bird can get into that can get him electrocuted.

Funding for this program was provided by Desert Program Partners.

If the lion is king of the jungle, the raptor rules the sky.

Reigning from above the raptor is especially suited for supremacy.

All raptors are built to find and eat flesh.

No matter the size or species, each has eagle eyes to forage, talons to tear and a curved beak to devour.

The raptor is king of the sky.

Living in six of the seven continents, raptors range from a few inches tall to over a yard.

One of the biggest is the Andean Condor which uses the world’s largest wingspan, over 10 feet, to soar above canyons in its namesake mountains of South America.

In North America, the largest raptor is the Golden Eagle.

It ranges from Canada into Mexico where its image graces the national flag.

Found in the Western United States, the Golden Eagle is a fierce predator that has been known to attack large mammals, including coyotes and bears, in defense of its young.

The eagle’s kingly traits have bestowed upon it special significance.

We consider eagles sacred.

There’s a lot of spiritual meanings behind it depending on what type of native you are or what tribe or whatever but to me it’s always been sacred.

The eagles build huge nests in high places including trees, telephone poles and on cliffs.

This one should be good to go.

Okay.

It’s a scramble up and it could be muddy today.

In Northern New Mexico, on the Jicarilla Apache Indian Reservation, a group of biologists is working with the tribe to gather data by placing satellite transmitters on the backs of Golden Eagles, starting from the first day the eagle leaves its nest, on its own.

What I expect to happen is for Mark to come over and the eagle to kind of cower, possibly maybe move to the edge and think about it but it should be young enough it’ll stay in the nest.

So you’re thinking I want to go down this gully?

Okay.

Yeah, it’s down that crack basically.

We chose that method because of the long life of the transmitter.

It doesn’t do you much good to know if all your birds survive one month but if you have a three year window to look at, then you get a decent amount of time for survival rates.

Okay, going down.

He’s going down.

He’s going in.

Now’s the critical time.

Oh, I can’t see the eaglet yet.

There it is.

It’s moving to the left.

Okay.

I don’t think it’s going to jump.

He’s got it cornered.

He’s got it.

He’s getting ready to bag it.

Placing the fledgling in the bag allows for a safer and calmer transport from the nest to the field laboratory located on the tailgate.

Golden Eagles can’t be any calmer than when a hood is placed on their head.

The bird has fallen asleep... Yeah, either that or it’s... You bored him to death.

Sorry, buddy.

Sleep I mean.

Wake up.

In addition to confirming a bird’s survival, the transmitter will deliver quite a bit of other vital data about the royal life too.

Extra effort and care is used to ensure that the added luggage doesn’t restrict that movement.

This is a GPS transmitter so we’ll get GPS fixes, about 10 a day on the hour, one middle of the night, midnight I think it’s programmed for.

These are 45 grams on the transmitter and about another 15 or so in the harness and basically it goes on just like a backpack.

We kind of gauge how big we think this guy’s going to get as he matures and leave enough room for growth.

This tells us the exact position of the bird at each of those hourly increments, gives us an altitude so we know how high the bird is above ground level.

Solar charged.

This is designed to stay on the bird for the duration of the bird’s life.

And the length of that life often depends on people.

Much of the Golden Eagle’s range is in windy terrain, locations prized by renewable energy projects whose machinery can be deadly to raptors.

The satellite info will help biologists and managers analyze this and other human impacts throughout the Golden Eagle’s range.

It shows that these guys are moving a lot more than we thought.

A lot of the birds, not just the youngsters, which we kind of anticipated would move a lot, but even some of the birds that we believe are resident adults down here, when they’re not breeding down in New Mexico, they tend to move north and so we’re seeing a lot of northward drift amongst these birds which we expected for some of the youngsters but not so much for the older birds.

We don’t want to have this transmitter occlude that crop at all so we put it a little bit looser on the front than we normally would to accommodate that.

I expect this bird to stay in the nest another two weeks.

I want to get some wing flapping just to see how that transmitter sits in there.

Ah, the whole thing’s going down so we’re good.

This lets us check how the transmitter fits around that crop also.

This is the good part.

Yeah.

They tear pieces off about this size so this is pretty much what he’s used to eating.

The only difference is this has got lots of water on it so he’s getting lots of hydration too.

This is the impressive part, when you see how big these feet are.

That’s an impressive meat hook right there.

I like it.

I like the habitat.

I like to see where they live and stuff like that.

It’s important.

Welcome home.

Okay, ground crew, I’m going to leave the nest here so if there’s going to be a flyer, watch from now on.

Many raptors are migratory and travel according to the seasons.

An uncommon hawk ventures just north of the international border and into Southeastern Arizona in the spring to breed.

Bird watchers flock to the San Pedro River for a glimpse.

Oh, yellow warbler overhead.

As with most birds, these regal raptors don’t have handy satellite transmitters attached but there are still plenty of ways you can find them in the wild.

An aspiring raptor watcher definitely needs to do some homework.

Study the raptors and their preferred habitats, learn what time of year they’re present, study the vocalizations.

Just like any hunter, whether you’re stalking with binoculars or a camera, you’ve got to learn your quarry’s behavior, learn what to expect from them.

There.

Upstream.

For basic raptor identification, shape is very, very important.

Gray Hawks for example are a short tailed, long rounded winged hawk compared to the Cooper’s Hawk which is a very long tailed, short rounded winged hawk.

They both live in forest environments and they’re both pretty maneuverable among the trees but the Gray Hawk spends more time soaring and is more of an ambush predatory and the Cooper’s Hawk is more of a pursuit predator.

That long tail acts like a rudder.

And so thinking about their different hunting styles helps you focus on those shapes that are so very important.

But even before you place glass to eye, you need to learn where you can expect to find them.

Different raptors are found in varying habitats depending on their stature, flight patterns and prey.

With a Red Tailed Hawk, you can expect them to get out and soar overhead for long periods of time and be fairly easily visible.

Red Tail you can find them sitting out on a utility pole along the highway.

Gray Hawk not so much.

They’re more likely to be sitting on the lower shaded branches of these big Cottonwood trees.

They don’t seem to like to be out in the sun all that much.

Getting into the high quality habitat is very, very important and the San Pedro River is a fantastic spot for Gray Hawks and other forest nesting birds of prey.

This river is a river of water but it’s more than that, it’s a river of trees.

If it was not for these trees, we would not have the Gray Hawks.

There just...there wouldn’t be places to nest, there wouldn’t be places to hunt.

They love these big trees and that gives them the shelter that they feel comfortable in.

And while Red Tailed and even Harris’s Hawks are more likely found in the open desert beside the San Pedro River, this riparian area in Southeastern Arizona is one of the few places in North America where the Gray Hawk crosses the border.

Gray Hawk is still a rare bird in the U.S. but it seems to be doing very well in Arizona despite our persistent drought.

It seems to be very densely populated here along the San Pedro River with good, healthy looking populations to where you might encounter a couple of pairs in a mile and a half or two miles of river.

But they’re mainly a tropical raptor so a lot of their prey is warm weather prey.

Gray Hawks are a smallish bird of prey and so they tend to eat fairly small prey.

They eat a lot of large insects but they do eat a lot of lizards and snakes.

They eat lots of reptiles and that’s true of some of the other tropical raptors here in Arizona as well.

It’s not reptiles but mostly insects that help sustain one California population of a tiny raptor found throughout the New World.

The Burrowing Owl is one of the few owls that are frequently active during the day and also one of the smallest.

As with most raptors, habitat destruction by humans has taken its toll on the Burrowing Owl.

But this group, found in the vicinity of the Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, gets a boost from local farmers.

Because of agriculture, crickets are an abundant insect that lives in the Imperial Valley.

Say for example a alfalfa field gets irrigated, crickets are at the leading edge of all that water and so Burrowing Owls are among the birds that are able to take advantage of those crickets that are being pushed ahead by that water.

The Imperial Valley has one of the highest concentrations of Burrowing Owls in all of North America.

As much as 2500 pairs of Burrowing Owls nest here in the valley every year.

Burrowing Owls naturally occurred here before human settlement.

They’re essentially a desert bird.

They are able to get a lot of their needed water from the bugs they eat and so far the animal life.

But that water does provide the food sources that they do need.

As its name implies, the Burrowing Owl spends lots of time in or on the ground.

Historically its habitat was undisturbed, dry, treeless grasslands and deserts where it often lived alongside burrowing mammals, primarily prairie dogs.

These days they are often encountered in human altered landscapes.

The agriculture helps produce a type of habitat that it appreciates; cleared ditch banks, it doesn’t like too much vegetation.

They don’t have that digging ability.

It appears they can maybe enhance the size of a burrow that a squirrel has already dug and take advantage of that but no, they can’t dig the holes themselves and so they have a pretty tight relationship with other animals like squirrels or any other digging mammal.

Wildlife managers have experimented with artificial nesting burrows to help Burrowing Owls establish nesting areas, in this valley just about with 100 percent success.

That extra assistance extends beyond their neighborhoods.

Though they’re not federally listed as threatened or endangered, they’re protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which protects all raptors.

This act requires a permit for any interaction with the majestic birds of prey.

Regardless, some burrowing owl populations are struggling.

In the Imperial Valley they’re doing fine.

They seem to have a pretty stable population, about 2500 pair.

But throughout North America it’s a different story.

A lot of their areas are losing ground there which makes the Imperial Valley population all that more of a positive story.

The story for all raptors is becoming increasingly intertwined with humans and where we live.

In the West, it’s not just rural towns but even large metropolitan areas like Las Vegas, Albuquerque and Tucson, Arizona.

Most raptors at one level or another are adapting to urban environments throughout the world really.

I don’t think any of them are really excluded if the conditions are correct.

Humans’ impact on the raptor kingdoms continues to increase.

Raptors must either avoid or adjust.

Avoiding areas impacted by humans involves competing for declining resources in the wild.

Adjusting means learning to live alongside the humans.

Not all raptors are flexible enough to pull that off.

But for those that can, there are advantages and disadvantages to living with humans, especially in arid areas.

Relative to the desert there’s lots of big trees that serve as nesting structures.

There’s a lot of water relative to the desert in terms of watering grass lawns and drip irrigation systems and pools and bird baths.

And there’s a tremendous amount of food.

Getting prey from the backyard to their baby’s beaks is quite the family affair for Cooper’s Hawks.

While the female awaits nest side, the male uses his specialized flesh eating anatomy to hunt and kill.

After dressing the meal, the male and female make a quick pole top exchange.

Then mama’s back to the nest with breakfast.

It doesn’t really matter if they eat birds or mammals.

There’s lots of Cottontails in town, lots of quail, lots of doves.

One of the most common species in town is doves and that’s one of the primary prey items of Cooper’s Hawks.

A diet loaded with doves may fill the bellies of the nestlings but it can also expose them to a harmful parasite, a concern that has generated special scrutiny.

For Cooper’s Hawks that was part of the reason we began looking intensively at the population.

Their nestlings were getting a disease called trichomoniasis that they get because the parents feed them doves and the doves carry it.

And it is an urban related problem in that they eat a lot of a doves in town because there are lots of them but their diet is less composed of doves outside of town so it’s an urban related disease simply because of the prey abundance here.

It’s a little bit opposite what it is in a natural setting.

In a natural setting fledglings and nestlings do quite well right up to the time they leave their nest area and then they don’t do well in that first year of life.

In Tucson, because they’re being fed these doves that may carry this trichomonas gallinae, they don’t do well, when they were getting this regularly, they didn’t do well up to about the time they fledged but if they survived the disease and lived into their first year, their survival rates were remarkably high.

So it’s almost the opposite of what we see in a natural environment.

To properly study these elusive and noble birds requires individual identification with a tag and a bird in hand.

To get that, biologists rely on the raptor’s own fearless instinct.

She has nestlings in a nest that’s a little ways behind us.

Her job at this stage is to feed them but the other part of her job is to protect them and so when she sees and hears this owl out near her nest, then her job is to try and drive it away.

It’s not just diet that makes a city a tough realm to rule.

To birds used to living in the great outdoors, things aren’t always what they may seem.

The primary agent of mortality for adult Cooper’s Hawks is window strikes.

They can’t see the difference between a reflection in glass and reality and so they frequently will fly into windows in pursuit of some other prey and once...if they crash hard enough, they kill themselves.

The same would go for flying in front of cars.

The other big agent of mortality for the larger species, the Red Tail Hawks, Great Horned Owls and Harris’s Hawks, is electrocution.

Our overhead distribution system for electricity in Tucson has a number of places on almost every pole that a large bird can be electrocuted.

Since they can’t detect electricity and they don’t know where they should or should not be sitting on those poles, it ends up being a problem for them.

Raptors’ strategies for hunting and personal protection have helped them survive for millions of years.

High perches give them an easy way to scout prey and avoid their own ground-based predators.

This can lead to shocking encounters.

We understand that there is an inherent hazard with our equipment and it’s also an attraction to the birds because it’s the highest point in the area so we do whatever we can to make our facilities adaptable for them and protect them.

What we want to try to do with these structures is turn them into what we call a rubber tree.

We’re trying to rubber up everything that that bird can get into that can get him electrocuted.

What we’re concentrating most on now are the nest sites.

They have the young in them.

We want to go ahead and protect the poles around the nest sites, that’s our priority, to protect the young in the nest.

Our second is where electrocutions occur.

We get call ins from customers, we get call ins from our own crew.

We’ll go out and investigate and based on what we find, that’s where we decide what we’re going to protect.

With thousands of possible perches and nest sites, Tucson Electric Power doesn’t just wait for calls to come in.

They actively seek the popular poles to rubber up.

To find those most favored by raptors requires a trained eye.

I spend a lot of time driving really slowly and probably annoying other drivers and staring up.

I’m just gathering location, species and the number of poles that are dangerous.

We mark up the nests so we can proactively protect them for TEP.

We’ve located nests and then their studies have shown that the most fatalities happen within 300 meters of that nest so we want to find them, get them protected.

We have a juvenile Red Tail, probably a male by the size of him.

We can tell he’s electrocuted by the two points of contact.

We have burned feathers, skin down to the bone on the wing and then missing leg on this side.

It’s absolutely typically of what we see of electrocution in a bird this size.

This guy’s probably two and a half months old.

Two, two and a half months.

He’s new out of the nest but not brand new.

We have two sites in town that the Harris’s have been there for at least 15 years and they’ll build on the nest every year and so some of these nests are quite sizeable, very easy to see.

Or they’ll put one in one tree and then go one tree over, and then one tree over, and then one tree over and you’ll drive down the street and just see structure, structure, structure and they’re still there.

They’re doing well.

Faithfully reusing the same thrones, called nest fidelity, has spurred TEP to some innovative solutions in their attempts to protect yet still accommodate the raptors.

What we’re going to do here today is we’re going to remove a 300 KVAR fixed capacitor that has a bird nest on it so that we can put a bird perch up so hopefully the birds can return to their nest in a safe spot.

We’re going to put a pre-manufactured perch in place and after that perch is in place and secured, we’re going to take the nest back up and put it on the perch and hopefully attract the birds to come back to the nest on the perch.

The nest has been there for several years.

This particular bird perch we’ve never installed so we’ve got to make some modifications.

This is something they don’t teach us in lineman school or in the apprenticeship so we just adapt and do what we can and hopefully it all works out.

It doesn’t get much better than that.

It seems as though the insulated trees and manufactured housing may be working.

Electrocution rate on juveniles in the nest has gone down significantly in the 15 years we’ve had the program.

It’s become a passion and what’s very good about it is that I see the direct impact that my efforts have on the environment.

I’ll protect a nest one year and come back and find babies in it the next year and it’s very fulfilling, it’s very satisfying to see success, immediate success.

From nests atop a pole to burrows below the ground, the raptor’s realm is constricting as humans encroach on their habitat.

The raptors that seem to be weathering these changes the best are those that have the ability to reign alongside people and even within cities.

Regardless, the raptors still rule the sky.

Funding for this program was provided by Desert Program Partners.