Carson holding on to one of her sticks.
Even through the ice and snow last week, birds can sense that it’s spring. There seem to be more osprey than we’ve seen in recent years in the Cable area and they are busy nesting. Over the course of two or three days I watched one pair’s nest-building progress on my daily commute. What started as a few tree branches dangling precariously from a utility pole quickly became a sturdy mass of sticks. It is similar in structure to bald eagle and red-tailed hawk nests. In red-tailed hawks, the male and female work together to collect sticks and weave them together into a nest lined with strips of bark, fresh plants, or dried vegetation.
Our red-tailed hawk, Carson, has also sensed the springtime urge to build. Noticing an uptick in her activity this spring, I decided to test her interest in nest building. I placed 5 sticks around her mew one night and wondered if she would touch them. I was surprised to see each stick had moved the next morning. Since then, she moves the sticks around nearly every day, and occasionally she gathers them on top of her platform as if waiting for more sticks to appear so she can make a decent-sized nest.
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