Flushing Times Ledger, NY – Aug 23, 2014
By Alex Christodoulides
08/23/2014
Briarwood resident Jeffrey Kollbrunner has spent the past five years documenting the comings and goings of his neighbors, their little ones, their meals together.
His neighbors, who have lived in Briarwood for at least 13 years, are a pair of red-tailed hawks he has photographed since 2003 using techniques that do not interfere with the birds’ lives. A selection of the photos is on display in the Barham Rotunda at Queens College’s Rosenthal Library through September 28.
A fluffy white head with bright eyes peers over the edge of its nest in one photo in a cycle depicting the rapid growth of hawk hatchlings, and in the following week’s photo the bird is big enough to perch on the edge of the nest.
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“It’s getting harder and harder to get pictures of them,” Kollbrunner said by telephone. The babies are getting bigger and more independent as the weeks go by, he said.
Kollbrunner said he first learned of the hawks from his wife, who had cut behind Borough Hall one day in 1994 and noticed a large bird. “She rushed home to tell me, and I got my camera and we went back and took pictures. We found one of the babies,” he said, but they never found the nest or the parents that year. “Either it was our lack of experience tracking them that year, or we didn’t look too hard. We saw them the following year, so we knew they were in the area, and we started to learn their territorial boundaries and habits, and where their nests were.” The pair eventually settled on a fire escape for two years before changing homes again, but more often tend to move from one nest to another.
When they settled on an air conditioner at a Briarwood office building, Kollbrunner – who by then had a contact at the New York Audubon Society – arranged for a webcam to be installed and positioned so that he could observe the nest. “The webcam was ordered and sponsored through Audubon. We toured the building to find a good place to install it,” he said. “We were originally going to put the camera in a window, but the windows were never washed. So we installed it in an air conditioner sleeve on April 10, and April 11 they had their first hatch. We could tell because their behavior was different. They were clearly not just rearranging twigs in the nest.”
Manhattan’s famous Fifth Avenue resident hawks, Pale Male and Lola, are the same breed as the ones Kollbrunner has photographed. “Pale Male and Lola go back to the same nest every year, but these birds – except for 2 years they were on fire escape – build a different nest every year,” Kollbrunner said. “They rotate through the neighborhood, spending two or three nights on one. It’s part of maintaining their territory. They like fire escapes, large window air-conditioning units, and they prefer to be about six or seven stories up.”
Kollbrunner has documented all aspects of hawk life: feeding, hatching, hunting, learning to fly.
“Using diverse photographic techniques that do not interfere with these incredible raptors, I have been able to get closer into their world. None of my photographs have been retouched or modified in any way; they are presented as they were originally captured,” he wrote in his introduction to the exhibit.
Kollbrunner’s introduction also explains that he has been observing the hawk couple for more than a decade, and a 2014 article he wrote about them for the New York City Audubon Society describes the birds’ successes, behavior and hardships living in an urban area.
Red-tailed hawks’ preferred habitat includes forests and fields, both of which are in short supply in Queens, and they are carnivorous creatures that prefer small mammals, rodents and reptiles – which are available in the five boroughs. And they have expanded their diet to include pigeons, Kollbrunner said, and have begun using different hunting techniques.
“They usually eat rats, squirrels, mice, voles. When they started catching pigeons, people took notice,” he said. “The hawks fly high in the sky, and it’s almost like they have a map of their territory in their minds. They observe from a high vantage point, and pigeons are creatures of habit and tend to roost in same places. They raid the pigeon nests. The red-tails are aware where these nests are, fly in, come out with a pigeon in their talons.”
Another key difference is that the red-tailed hawks, typically solitary hunters, have begun going out in pairs, especially when the quarry is pigeons, Kollbrunner said.
“They’ve started to hunt in tandem. We see Papa hawk circling, and then he starts to dive and scatters them, then the mother hawk flies into the flock and plucks one,” he said. “This is more typical of Harris hawks, who communally hunt in groups of up to 6.”
Reach reporter Alex Christodoulides by e-mail at achristodoulides@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 155.
If You Go
The Urban Red-Tailed Hawk – Photographs by Jeffrey Kollbrunner
Date: Through Sept. 28
Location: Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library, Barham Rotunda, Queens College, 65-30 Kissena Blvd. Flushing
Cost: Free
For More: www.jknaturegallery.com, www.qc.cuny.edu/Library for hours and directions
