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| Mission of the Urban Raptors
Urban Raptors is dedicated to protecting and promoting the welfare and well being of raptors living in urban environments in the United States through its education, advocacy, research, and rehabilitation programs.
Over the past three decades, hawks, falcons and other raptors have moved into our urban areas with increasing frequency. Driven by loss of habit and attracted by a plentiful food supply, raptors have found urban areas such as New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Montreal, much to their liking.
New York City has unusually high numbers of Peregrine Falcons inhabiting its buildings and bridges--a direct benefit of the efforts of the Peregrine Fund to reintroduce the species to the Eastern United States.
While these birds are a delight to urban dwellers, they present their own special set of needs and challenges. If urban raptors are to survive and prosper in urban areas the phenomena will need to be better understood and the birds will require a gentle help from "the hand of man."
The Urban Raptors was created to study the urban raptor phenomena and to advocate for the raptors continued survival in urban areas. The foundation also serves as a focal point for rehabilitation efforts and as an information resource for the study of hazards (such as rodenticides) that confront raptors in the urban environment.
The we are in the process of being formed as a not-...
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| Rodenticide Problems | Urban raptors, too, fall victim to rodenticides
Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan Wednesday, August 1, 2007 Chaucer Street is a kind of village in the Berkeley flatlands. Every Fourth of July, Chaucerians - urban farmers, gardeners, brewers - celebrate with a street fair and barter session. This year, though, the holiday was marred. Around 8 a.m., Dan Rubino found a dead hawk in his 2-foot-deep backyard wading pool. He drained, moved and refilled the pool, only to have another dead hawk turn up there in the afternoon. "We were absolutely devastated," Rubino said. "We always knew there were hawks in the neighborhood. We could see and hear them, although we didn't know they had a nest." After calling local humane societies ("Nobody cared"), he sought out Lisa Owens Viani, a neighbor who he knew had fostered a brood of barn owls the year before. Owens Viani identified the two birds as juvenile Cooper's hawks, part of a family that had nested in a tall eucalyptus near Rubino's property. She had watched them learn to fly. She suggested taking their bodies to WildCare, a wildlife rehabilitation center in San Rafael, for testing. The next day, Rubino found three dead mice in his yard. "We've never had rats or mice before," he said. The adult hawks and a surviving fledgling hung around awhile, but he hasn't seen or heard them lately. The pool hasn't gone up again, and Rubino's 4-year-old son is afraid to go into the yard. Now the necropsy results are in: Liver tissue from both hawks tested positive for brodifacoum, a potent anticoagulant rodenticide. Brodifacoum, the lethal ingredient in D-Con, Talon and Havoc rodent baits, kills by causing internal bleeding, which results in intense thirst. The hawks may have been desperate for water. The results would strongly suggest they had eaten rats or mice that had consumed the poison. Ralph Pericoli, who runs the Cooper's Hawk Intensive Nesting Survey, a volunteer project of the Gold...
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| Urban Raptors | The New Urban Flight
Winter 2004 Defenders of Wildlife Magazine
These days, city dwellers don't need to go far to spot falcons, hawks and other birds of prey By Bill Updike Devotees call it “the hawk bench.” At first glance, it’s a bench just like the many others scattered around New York City’s Central Park. What makes this one different is the people who gather there and the animal that piques their interest. The “hawk benchers” arrive as early as 5 a.m., and often don’t leave until after sunset, their eyes baggy and rimmed with indentations from binoculars or spotting scopes. The sight they’ve come to see would have been nearly unimaginable three decades ago: a red-tailed hawk plummeting down from its perch on a high-rise building to snap up an unsuspecting squirrel, pigeon or a tasty city rat. Seeing the nearly two-foot-long, broad-winged, round-tailed hawks soaring and diving over the park gives the hawkaholics a connection with the wild world normally not available to those that live in metropolises such as New York City. According to E.J. McAdams, the executive director of New York City Audubon, the Central Park hawks give people a “sense that wildlife has returned to the city.” “I love knowing that, just because I live in a big city, it doesn’t mean that I have to be isolated from the natural world,” says Marie Winn, a regular hawk bencher and author of Red-Tails in Love, a popular book about Central Park’s birds. “I love the feeling of community I’ve found among my fellow Central Park birdwatchers and nature lovers, who, being city dwellers just as I am, might treasure the wilderness in our little urban enclave more than those who live out in the country and in the wide open spaces.” What the hawk benchers are witnessing in New York is part of a growing phenomenon around the country—the arrival of large birds of prey...
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