Last Monday, I caught up with the adult female of Tompkins Square Park in the late afternoon. She’s much easier to find now that her kids are gone. These hawks are multi-denominational. They love to perch on the crosses of three different churches in the neighborhood.
In the late summer, the adult male was the most frequent visitor to Tompkins Square park. The female was much harder to find.
As fall has arrived, both hawks are spending more time together in the park. On Saturday afternoon, they spent about 30 minutes together in a Gingko tree on the east side of the park.
I spent Saturday bird watching rather than hawk watching and like earlier in the week got mesmerized by Ruby-throated Hummingbirds.
Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are enjoying feeding on the Jewelweed flowers in Central Park this season, and occasionally rest on branches nearby. This young bird rested on the same branch every five minutes or so, sometimes staying only a few seconds but sometimes stayed for as long as two minutes.
The adult male of the Tompkins Square Park was hunting near the pool of the park, before he went to the flagpole and then to a tree to roost for the evening.
The Washington Square Park hawks have been spending time building an alternate nest above the Angelica Theater at Mercer and Houston. At sunset, one of the hawks was on the balcony of above the new nest. (Hawks are known to build alternative nests and not use them, so I would suspect that come spring the activity will once again shift back to Washington Square Park.)
