I saw one fledgling for about four seconds during my nearly two hour Washington Square Park walkabout this morning.
It was soaring about twenty/twenty five stories above West 3rd Street and LaGuardia Place (a block south of the park) as it traveled from southeast to northwest:
It looked like it was flying diagonally toward the park and if I made it back to the park in time, I might have caught it entering from roughly the southwestern entrance.
I backtracked to the park to look for it but did not see it or any of the other Hawks.
When it was time for me to go I went to the quiet Washington mews to switch lenses. I sat down on the curb below One Fifth Avenue (a few feet behind where the lady on the left-hand side of the photo below is walking):
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| Permission to post this photo by “Beyond My Ken” via this link. |
I saw a stray, random piece of wire on the road abutting the curb where I was about to sit but I didn’t think anything of it at first and even had my foot on it when I was switching lenses.
The metal made a jingling sound when it bounced back into place as I stood up and took my foot off it. It was only then when I paid attention to its existence.
I stared at it for a second and had to wonder if it was the same piece of metal Rosie was carrying in her beak on July 8th. I mean, I was standing right below One Fifth (where the Hawks hang out just about every day) so maybe she or Bobby flew with it again at some point and dropped it while en route to One Fifth? I snapped a photo of the wire to compare with Rosie’s wire when I got home.
Below is the photo of Rosie I took with her wire on July 8th (it is the 37th photo from that post):
The bent section on the right of each piece resemble each other (the one on the road perhaps being upside down) but it looks like the wire I saw today was a wee bit longer than the one Rosie had a few weeks ago (darn!). It sure would have been funny if I had stumbled upon the same piece!It could still very well be something they collected and lost for nesting material. It looked similar to the wire they’ve collected in the recent past and was found on an otherwise pristine stretch of road off the beaten city track.
A fellow Hawk-watcher let me know they had seen either Rosie or Bobby in a tree outside Silver Center around the time I was in the park (I had missed spotting it) and another said they saw a fledgling nearabouts where the fledgling I saw three hours earlier was headed. The fledgling was spotted on NYU’s Law School building (along the southwest section of the park). We agreed it could have been the same fledgling.