Lowcountry Raptors

09/11/2026

09/05/2026

Right now through the rest of September, one of the largest raptor migrations in North America is passing directly over parts of the eastern and central US, and most people never look up long enough to see it.

Broad-winged hawks migrate in massive groups called kettles, riding rising columns of warm air called thermals to glide for miles without flapping, conserving enormous amounts of energy for a journey that can stretch over 4,000 miles to Central and South America. A single kettle can hold hundreds, sometimes well over a thousand birds, spiraling together in the same rising column before peeling off in a long, streaming line toward the horizon.

At Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania, staff and volunteers have counted this migration every single autumn since 1934, the longest continuously running raptor count in the world. Peak single-day counts during the third week of September have exceeded 1,600 broad-winged hawks passing one lookout point in a matter of hours.

Unlike songbirds that migrate mostly at night, these raptors travel by day, which means the migration is fully visible if you know when and where to look.

If you're near a ridge or open sky this week, look up on a clear day with a light breeze. You might catch a kettle of a thousand hawks passing directly overhead.

08/21/2026

For those of you who have followed Jackie and Shadow, The National Eagle Repository is her final resting place. Her feathers will be distributed among Native American tribes for religious and ceremonial purposes.

Jackie’s life began in the mountains of Big Bear Valley, but the final chapter of her journey carried a very different meaning—one shaped by wildlife law, science, and traditions far older than the nest camera that made her known around the world.

After Jackie died following 23 days of intensive care at Ojai Raptor Center, California wildlife officials announced that her remains would first undergo a necropsy through San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

After that process, her remains were to be transported to the National Eagle Repository in Colorado, part of the federal system governing protected bald and golden eagle remains.

For many Jackie followers, this part of her story may be unfamiliar.

Bald eagles remain federally protected after death. The National Eagle Repository provides eligible eagle feathers, parts and remains to enrolled members of federally recognized Tribes for religious, cultural and ceremonial purposes.

It means Jackie's physical journey extends far beyond the mountain territory where millions came to know her.

But one important distinction should remain clear:

The eagle shown in the accompanying image is NOT Jackie. It is being used only to illustrate the National Eagle Repository and the process associated with her final journey.

Jackie's story began in Big Bear in 2012, when she became the valley's first documented locally hatched bald eagle chick. Years later, cameras would allow people across the world to watch her raise young, endure mountain storms and share the nest with Shadow.

Her final journey is different from those familiar scenes—but it remains connected to something larger than one individual eagle: the protection of the species and the cultural significance eagles have carried for generations.

From Big Bear to a legacy reaching far beyond it, Jackie’s remarkable story continues. 🦅❤️

08/21/2026

Migration has started. Let's keep those lights out to help the birds!!!

**Lights Out Alert: Bird Highway Returns This Weekend**

Here they come! While the fall bird migration peaks in our area during September, an early wave is likely Saturday night. The wind pattern is perfect for the birds, and they will likely take advantage and move across the entire Great Lakes region. More than 200 million birds are projected by the Birdcast model. It is possible that the bird surge will be much higher than that number. The reason why is because Birdcast uses data from the GFS computer model. That model shows a good wind flow for the birds, but the European computer model shows a great pattern for migratory birds. Either way, bird traffic should be high, but it has the potential to overperform. Saturday night is a good time to turn off those outdoor lights to help this early surge of birds navigate south.

08/21/2026

I wanted to share this again. This is one of my favorite examples of an animal adaptation!

Eastern screech owls kill every animal they bring home to their chicks. Every mouse arrives headless. Every beetle is crushed. Every piece of prey is delivered dead to the nest. The one exception is the Texas blind snake. Owls bring blind snakes home alive, drop them into the nest, and the snakes burrow beneath the chicks and eat the parasitic insect larvae that would otherwise feed on the baby owls. Chicks raised in nests with live-in snakes grew up to 50 percent faster and were 25 percent more likely to survive.

Fred Gehlbach and Robert Baldridge at Baylor University near Waco, Texas, discovered the relationship in the 1970s and 1980s while studying screech owl nesting ecology in more than 70 experimental nest boxes. They published the finding in the journal Oecologia in 1987 under a title that told the entire story in one line: "Live Blind Snakes in Eastern Screech Owl Nests: A Novel Commensalism."

The Texas blind snake looks nothing like a snake. It looks like a shiny earthworm. It is five to eight inches long, pinkish gray, smooth-scaled, and essentially blind, with vestigial eyes reduced to dark spots beneath the head scales. It spends nearly its entire life underground, inside ant colonies and termite nests, eating larvae by the hundreds. Its tightly interlocking scales function as armor against ant bites. A related Australian species was documented eating 1,431 ant larvae in a single feeding. The blind snake is not a predator in any conventional sense. It is a larval vacuum cleaner that lives in the dirt.

An owl nest is a filthy place. The cavity floor fills with pellets, f***s, uneaten scraps of prey, and shed feathers as the breeding season progresses. Flies, beetles, and ants find the debris and lay their eggs in it. The resulting larvae feed on the organic matter and, in some cases, parasitize the owlets themselves, feeding on skin tissue, blood, or stored food that the chicks need. In a nest without blind snakes, the larval population grows unchecked for the duration of the nesting cycle.

In a nest with blind snakes, the larvae disappear. The snakes burrow into the debris layer beneath the chicks and eat every soft-bodied larva they encounter. They do this continuously, around the clock, for as long as the nest is active. Gehlbach and Baldridge found that 14 of their 70-plus nest boxes contained live blind snakes. Some nests had one. Some had as many as 15, all living beneath the chicks, all eating larvae, all apparently unharmed by the owlets sitting on top of them.

The selective behavior is the strangest part. Screech owls kill their prey before bringing it to the nest. They remove heads. They crush exoskeletons. They deliver inert food to helpless chicks that cannot defend themselves against a live animal in the dark. The blind snake is the only prey species they bring home alive. The researchers could not determine whether the owls recognized the snakes as beneficial and deliberately spared them, or whether the blind snake's smooth body and burrowing speed simply made it too difficult to kill in the talons. What they could determine was that the owls captured blind snakes regularly, that they did not kill them the way they killed everything else, and that the surviving snakes performed a measurable service inside the nest.

Some of the snakes were eaten by the chicks. The relationship was not perfectly cooperative. A blind snake dropped into a nest full of hungry owlets had a reasonable chance of being swallowed before it could burrow to safety. The ones that made it beneath the debris survived and fed. The ones that did not became food. Either way, the owl chick benefited.

Gehlbach described the relationship as commensalism, a partnership in which one species benefits and the other is unaffected. Whether the blind snakes benefit from living in an owl nest is unclear. They gain warmth, protection from their own predators, and an unlimited supply of insect larvae. They lose the option of leaving until the owls abandon the cavity. The owl gets a cleaner nest and healthier chicks. The snake gets a job it did not apply for.

Image is for illustration purposes only

Source: Gehlbach and Baldridge (1987), Oecologia / Audubon / BirdNote / Marfa Public Radio / Earth Touch News.

08/11/2026

Our Red-Shouldered Hawk!

08/11/2026

Our new non-releasable (non-flighted) hatch year Red-Shouldered Hawk in training. Just too hot to be outside. Check out his full crop filled with yummy chopped mice!

08/11/2026

I love this Red Tailed Hawk, Capt. Andy. He is a stunning example of Buteo jamaicensis calurus- the Western subspecies of Red Tailed Hawk. Photo credit Mike Davis.