This hawk gobbled up neighbourhood chickens until she got too fat to fly

When someone brought an immobilized red-shouldered hawk to the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center last month, staff suspected she was either blinded, injured or poisoned.

After all, the agile huntress should have been soaring through the sky and hunting unwitting prey. But instead, she was found belly-up in a driveway near Roanoke, Va.

After a series of X-rays and bloodwork, veterinary staff ruled out any injuries or health issues behind the creature’s mobility issues. 

Instead, they found she was 910 grams — almost twice the average weight for her species. 

“[The] hawk’s diagnosis was just that she’s fat,” Katherine McGrath, the wildlife rescue’s director of operations, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. “She’s our big lady.”

Filled with fowl 

Once they had their diagnosis in hand, staff set about solving the mystery of how the hawk had gotten so hefty. 

“Wild animals, unless they’re being fed, typically do not get to a stage where we can clinically say that they’re obese. So we thought someone was keeping her illegally as a pet, you know, or as a falconry bird,” McGrath said.

The immobilized hawk weighed 0.91 kilograms, which is 910 grams or roughly two pounds. Member of her species usually range from 500 to 700 grams, says the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center. (Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center/Facebook)

They reached out to the people who found her, but they weren’t aware of anyone in the neighbourhood who practiced falconry or kept wild birds.

“And then we asked, ‘Do any of your neighbours have free-roaming poultry or chickens or anything like that?” she said.

The finders chatted with their neighbours and learned that, yes, several of them kept free-roaming chickens, which had been inexplicably disappearing in recent weeks. 

“And we were like, ‘Ah, well, we have the bandit,'” McGrath said.

‘She’s healthy and angry’

McGrath says it’s actually not that unusual for a hawk to eat so much it can’t move. 

Even a regular-weight hawk, she says, can become temporarily grounded after eating a large meal because the “balance of how much it takes for them to fly is so delicate.”

What’s more, she says, a hawk has no way of knowing when it’s had enough. So an all-you-can-eat buffet of easy pickin’ prey can be a recipe for disaster. 

“Most wild animals, because they have to live through winter or live through lean times, if they have a good steady supply of food, they are going to … gorge themselves,” McGrath said. 

Staff at the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center says this over-stuffed hawk will be ready to fly free in a matter of weeks. (Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center/Facebook)

But, all things considered, McGrath says their pudgy patient is doing just fine. 

“She’s actually showing all of the normal red-shouldered hawk behaviours,” she said. 

And by normal hawk behaviours, McGrath means she’s wary of her human caretakers and mad as hell about her unwilling captivity. 

“She does what we call the funny chicken dance … where they sort of throw up their wings and try to kick out with their feet at you because they want you to be away,” she said.

“So other than not being able to fly, everything about that bird says that she’s healthy and angry, which is just what we want.”

Katherine McGrath of the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center says she and her colleagues have been ‘delighted’ by their voracious guest. (Submitted by Katherine McGrath)

Soon, McGrath says, the prodigious predator will fly free once more.

She’s already losing weight and gaining mobility as staff feed her a restricted, all-natural diet, and take her for regular exercise in their enclosure. McGrath suspects she’ll be ready to leave in a few weeks. 

Before they release her, McGrath says the centre’s staff will get in touch with nearby residents to give them a heads up and ask them to keep their chickens enclosed for a while. 

“We do try to mitigate the ability for them to get into trouble again,” she said.