In the News

August 01, 2007

Introducing the Lloyd Center's newest employee: A red-shouldered hawk with no name

By ROBERT BARBOZA
Editor, The Chronicle

DARTMOUTH — The young red-shouldered hawk now in residence at the Lloyd Center for the Environment has a new lease on life, thanks to its rescue by a pair of Dartmouth residents.

Lloyd Center staffer Jamie Bogart was dispatched to help retrieve the young hawk, grounded by a serious wing injury, and unable to fly. The wounded bird was taken to a bird expert at Marion Animal Hospital, who performed emergency surgery and amputated part of the right wing.

The story has a happy ending. The Lloyd Center for the Environment applied for the state and federal permits required to possess a protected species, and the recovered but crippled hawk— "probably a male, because of its size," suggests center staffer Bruce Hutchings— "but we're not quite sure about that yet."

"I've been in the process of training it to go on my hand," Bruce explained to visitors, after pulling on the heavy elk hide gloves that protect that arm from the hawk's razor-sharp talons. After many, many working sessions with the wild bird, he is now able to coax it onto the falconer's gauntlet without much trouble.

After a few months of training to be comfortable with humans, the hawk will become a roving ambassador for the Lloyd Center, visiting area schools and community groups, helping to educate both children and adults about some of the beautiful creatures who also share this environment, Bruce said.

The job's biggest bonus, he suggests, is that the yet-unnamed hawk doesn't have to commute to work, and gets to continue living in the town where it probably started its young life. Found at the nearby YMCA farm, the wounded bird was almost certainly a native, Bruce suggests.

"This is prime habitat for the red-shouldered hawk— open coast line, and maritime forest," the naturalist explained. They live here year-round, catching frogs, rodents and other small mammals as they can.

"The staff got together and built a nice house for it," noted Lloyd Center executive director D'Arcy MacMahon, touring the spacious "mews" created in the old goat shed by Bogart, Hutchings and center research director Mark Mello.

The airy enclosure includes several big branches laid sideways where the center's newest employee likes to catch the breeze and bask in the sun when not training. The hawk will have a good life here, MacMahon believes.

"It will be a marvelous educational tool for us. It will be a great way for us to exhibit just how beautiful these creatures around us really are," the director suggests, citing the successful environmental science programs the center's experts offer at schools in Dartmouth, Westport, and Fall River.

The Dartmouth hawk will serve out his days educating the public about the wonderful living things that flourish in a healthy environment, like the hundreds of schoolchildren that visit the center each year— visiting the estuary to learn about sea life, watching the newly-hatched ospreys just offshore, walking the miles of trails through shady woods and grassy meadows.

"It will help us show people just how valuable this all is," said MacMahon, gesturing at the mature woods surrounding the center's offices and classrooms with a dramatic, sweeping motion.

Deer, foxes, owls, ospreys and countless smaller creatures all share the same space with the human visitors and workers in these woods and air and waters, he notes. "This is what we're trying to protect."