From The Lonely Camo

In late May 2017, a pair of bald eagles in Sidney, British Columbia, raided a red-tailed hawk nest, carried two hawk chicks back to their own nest, and dropped them in with three eaglets. One chick was eaten. The other one bounced up and started begging for food.

The adult eagles fed it. They raised it alongside their own young for the rest of the season. It fledged successfully on June 22. Birders nicknamed it Spunky. The mayor of Sidney proclaimed Bald Eagle-Hawklet Day.

The nest sat on Summerset Place in Roberts Bay, inside the Shoal Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary about thirty kilometers north of Victoria. The eagle pair had been nesting at that specific location for twenty-six years. They were experienced parents that typically raised two or three eaglets per season. They were also efficient predators. Red-tailed hawks nest in the same territory, and bald eagles regularly prey on hawk chicks.

The dominant theory among the biologists who studied the case is that the adults hit a hawk nest, grabbed both chicks, and brought them home to feed their eaglets. Somewhere between arrival and consumption, the surviving hawk chick opened its mouth and screamed.

That scream is what flipped the switch. David Bird, an emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University who was living in Sidney at the time, told CBC that the hawk bounced up and started begging for food right away. The begging posture, the open mouth, the upturned beak, all of it closely resembles what an eaglet does when it wants to be fed. The adult eagles’ parental instincts fired. Instead of tearing the hawk apart, they stuffed fish into its mouth.

The hawk was roughly three weeks old when it was first spotted in the nest. The eaglets were around nine weeks. The size difference was enormous. A red-tailed hawk is about one-quarter the size of a bald eagle, and these eaglets already had weeks of growth on the newcomer. Experts predicted the eaglets would kill it through sibling aggression, the way larger raptor chicks routinely kill smaller nest mates. Spunky survived.

David Hancock of the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, who monitored the nest with video cameras, said the hawk had one thing in its favor: proof to be a survivor. Most eaglets are aggressive. This hawk proved that audacity gets you some things.

Spunky ate what the eagles ate. It developed what Hancock described as an eagle-like affinity for fish, a food that red-tailed hawks do not normally hunt. It was observed stealing a flounder from one of the eaglets and flying away from the nest with it. It also displayed mantling behavior, spreading its wings over food to hide it from the other birds, a hawk instinct that eagles do not typically use. It was a hawk acting like an eagle in some ways and a hawk in others, sorting out an identity crisis in real time at the top of a tree in a suburban bird sanctuary.

The real question biologists raised was not whether Spunky would survive the nest. It was what would happen after. Bald eagles migrate north to Alaska after the breeding season. Red-tailed hawks do not. They stay in the region and hunt rodents, rabbits, and snakes. Spunky had been raised on fish by eagles that were about to leave for a destination hawks do not follow. Its adoptive family was going to fly away, and the hawk would need to figure out how to be a hawk with no hawk to teach it. Hancock did not give up hope that the young hawk’s instincts would eventually override the eagle programming.

Spunky fledged on June 22 and left the nest area. The mayor of Sidney, Steve Price, who lived directly across the street from the nest tree, threw a block party. Birders who had been coming from around the world to watch the nest through telescopes attended. Hotels and restaurants in Sidney reported a measurable boost from the foot traffic.

The story did not end in Sidney. This was the third case Hancock had documented of bald eagles raising red- tailed hawk chicks. In 2022, it happened again on Gabriola Island near Nanaimo, BC. Webcam footage captured the exact moment: a mother eagle dropped a hawk chick into the nest as food for her eaglet. The chick hit the nest, came alive, and started begging. By nightfall the mother was feeding both birds equally. The eaglet watched the whole thing and did nothing.

A bald eagle can kill a red-tailed hawk in seconds. It outweighs the hawk by a factor of four. It takes hawk chicks from the nest as prey on a regular basis. But the begging call of a raptor chick works across species lines. The mouth opens, the head tilts back, the cry goes up, and something in the adult predator’s brain reads it as offspring instead of food. The difference between a meal and an adoption is one sound made at the right moment by an animal small enough to be swallowed whole. Spunky made the sound. The eagle that carried it home to be eaten raised it instead, fed it fish for six weeks, and watched it fly away into a life it was never supposed to have.

Source: Hancock Wildlife Foundation. CBC News, August 2017. National Geographic, July 2017. Washington Post, June 2017. BBC News, June 2017. American Eagle Foundation. David Bird, McGill University