Hawks Over Blissville

Locked inside and insulated from the hideous weather, I’ve been reminiscing about the time when you could just leave the house and walk around Queens without wearing 25 pounds of coat.

An annual “cabin fever” process, which invariably ends with a stir crazy photographer historian saying “enough of  this” (the actual expression is a bit more colorful, but Brownstoner is a family publication) and then marching out into the frozen wastes of Queens. A few years ago, after a remarkable snowstorm, my “enough of this” walk carried me to one of my favorite places – First Calvary Cemetery in Blissville.

You won’t believe what I found there.

Calvary is known for its monolithic statuary, with many columnar obelisks reaching to the sky. Some of these stone structures can rise 30 to 50 feet from the ground, which would make for a good vantage point on the surrounding acreage. That’s when I spotted an enormous bird perched upon one of these funerary monuments.

Calvary is used by all sorts of birds as a rest stop. Canadian Geese are seasonal visitors, and during the summer there are dozens of different bird specie available for observation here. Additionally, there’s a race of rabbits who live in the cemetery, not to mention all the other furry critters (dogs, cats, raccoons, opossums, etc.) which cross Calvary’s loam. Photographer Marcelo Barrera managed to get a shot of a Coyote here once, as published at NYPost.com. The NY Times presented this piece in 2007, which discusses the presence of Red Tail Hawks in another garden cemetery – Greenwood in Brooklyn.

This was the first time I’ve spotted a raptor here, although it makes sense that a probably juvenile Red Tail Hawk would come here to hunt.

From Wikipedia:

The Red-tailed Hawk is carnivorous, and an opportunistic feeder. Its diet is mainly small mammals, but it also includes birds and reptiles. Prey varies with regional and seasonal availability, but usually centers on rodents, comprising up to 85% of a hawk’s diet.Additional prey (listed by descending likelihood of predation) include lagomorphs, shrews, bats, snakes, waterfowl, fish, crustaceans and insects. Prey range in size from beetles to White-tailed Jackrabbits, which are double the weight of most Red-tails. In captivity in winter, an average Red-tail will eat about 135 g (4-5 oz) daily.

The Red-tailed Hawk hunts primarily from an elevated perch site, swooping down from a perch to seize prey, catching birds while flying, or pursuing prey on the ground from a low flight.

Once, this part of Queens was a swampy marshland with abundant game and wildlife. The area drew sportsmen from the great cities of Brooklyn and Manhattan, for hunting and fishing, to the rural extents of Newtown Creek. Nearby, aboriginal tribes of Lenape (the Maspeatche) made their camps near Mt. Zion Cemetery. When the Europeans came, they erected great hunting lodges and hotels along its banks to service the tourist trade from the East River cities. That was before the industries, before the Rural Cemeteries Act, and before the 800 pound gorilla came to town.

We may have forgotten about all of this, but the critters haven’t, and they come here due to ancestral habit.

Aboriginal tribesmen like the Lenape prized the feathers of these birds for use in ritual, and even today the plumage of Red Tail Hawks fall under the jurisdiction of the “Eagle Feather Law.“ Apparently, for those who believe in something, the presence of a Hawk in a cemetery would be quite a profound experience.

I would point out that a visit to “The City Birder” will reveal several spottings of similar animals all around the megalopolis, and you’ll find a few “things to do” in their recent “City Birder Tours” page.

Newtown Creek Alliance Historian Mitch Waxman lives in Astoria and blogs at Newtown Pentacle.