One of the females jumped to the upper ledge, Chico, our little guy, did too for his first time, the mom decided to feed them there and when the food risked being gone the other two jumped up.

The eyases are at the stage where they grab the prey and try to run with it to feed themselves while playing keepaway from the others, but in that tight and new space they were a lot more meek about it. They let Hartley play the mom. Feed me!

Fledge watch officially starts tomorrow.

Chico ended his day by dropping down the back side of the nestbox onto a ledge where there is nowhere to go unless he flies at least a little bit. Coasting downwards is easy; gaining height (oops) almost never happens their first day of flight. Maybe he can flutter/jump straight up to get back into the runway area, maybe not. So we’ll see.

Meantime, in case you missed it (multiple people made sure I did not, which I very much appreciate–thank you!), there’s a young Cooper’s hawk in New Jersey that has learned to use a pedestrian crossing button for his breakfast take-out.

When it sees a pedestrian approaching a particular intersection and then pushing the button, starting sounds for the blind to know how long they’ve got, the hawk is in a tree at the far end of the block, ready for it.

It is rush hour. It only waits at rush hour and only on weekdays.

Once the cars line up along the entire block–it takes ten–the hawk comes zooming fast and low using them as a cover. When he gets to where there’s a flock across the street in someone’s front yard every morning, he turns 90 degrees at the exact right spot from where he can’t see them yet and they can’t see him and bam! He gets his meal.

His staking out got staked out by a biologist.

He doesn’t bother on weekends because there won’t be enough cars.

Here’s a picture of the scene.

(Edit: Wait. There was when I googled to find it again but the photos aren’t showing via my linking to it, at least on my computer. But there’s the rest of the info and you ought to be able to bring it up.)