Chances that there is a third eyass in the Riverside nest decline with each day. Feeding behavior and other signs make twins rather than triplets the likely situation.
The eyasses are starting to grow their flight feathers. I love this period of time, because if you watch closely you can figure out how all the major tail and wing feathers are arranged. Something that is much harder to study once they’ve grown in.
I arrived at Riverside on Sunday after a thunderstorm to find a wet family of hawks. The father was on a street light drying off and the mother was feeding two eyasses.
The other known Red-tailed Hawk second clutches in the city, Inwood Hill and Astoria/RFK Bridge, both fledged over the last few days. A fledgling was seen in Inwood Hill by Jessica Ancker (via the Inwoodbirdwatchers Yahoo Group) and Peter Richter has pictures of the fledglings in Astoria on his Queens Raptors blog.
I’ve been busy with work commitments and finally got back to the Riverside nest this evening.
The Riverside eyasses have grown a lot bigger in just a few days. The two eyasses are hard to see together, but I definitely saw two today. (In the videos second section you’ll see a beak down at the butt of the eyass in the foreground for about half a second.)
I like watching eyasses at this stage. They’re big and active enough to get good glimpses, yet they’re still really cute and fluffy.
The nest was blown from side to side this evening in high winds. It looks like this new one is built very well. The hawks didn’t seem to mind the wind too much with the mother doing a feeding while the nest rocked back and forth!
The eyasses are getting easier to see. I was able to see them from a number of angles today and saw them every twenty minutes or so.
While the two eyasses aren’t yet easy to photograph, due to the foliage around the nest, they are getting easier to see during feedings (about every hour and a half). They can hold their heads up and compete for food while being feed. They should be very visible by next weekend.
A second eyass was visible today at the Riverside nest. (Eyasses don’t hatch all at the same time, so it’s common during the first few days for observers of a nest to see one, then two and hopefully three eyasses, after seeing just one initially.)
The winds were high along the river, so the video is a bit jumpy. Despite the poor quality of the video, it was great to see two healthy and hungry eyasses.
