Abducted baby hawk still alive and well in SLO County eagle’s nest. See the videos

For three weeks now, a red-tailed hawk chick snatched by a pair of bald eagles has defied the odds, managing to stay alive while sharing a San Luis Obispo County nest with two eaglets.

The strange bedfellows were spotted in May in a San Simeon tree, where a pair of bald eagle parents apparently adopted the baby hawk after originally bringing it back to their nest as food.

Instead of becoming a meal, the hawk chick continues to be sighted in apparent good health, fed daily alongside the two eaglets.

Since appearing in the nest, the hawk has grown from a chick with fluffy white plumage to an older juvenile with brown feathers. It looks notably different from the eaglets, which are larger, darker and have much the signature regal bills of bald eagles.

Observers amazed the baby hawk has survived

Bob Revel, program chairman of the Morro Bay Bird Festival, visited the nest Wednesday morning.

He heard from other photographers that a small duck that had been brought in as food had squirmed about and fallen out of the nest, to the dismay of the three chicks.

Kimberly Stroud, executive director of the Ojai Raptor Center, said it was unusual for the hawk chick to survive this long.

“It’s pretty amazing that it’s able to get this far along especially with those two big babies,” Stroud said.

Stroud added that the mom eagle has been doing a good job bringing enough food.

Morro Coast Audubon Society Program Director Torrey Gage-Tomlinson was also surprised at how the story has unfolded.

“This is exceedingly rare, like, really, really rare, that this chick is still alive,” Gage-Tomlinson said. ”It’d be really interesting to see what comes of this.”

Gage-Tomlinson also believed that the baby bird was brought in for prey, and that poses a continual risk.

“There’s just like a clock,” Gage-Tomlinson said. “You never know when it might become prey again.”

Gage-Tomlinson also said there were sightings of multiple California condors above the same nest, a rare occurrence of the birds that tend to breed in Big Sur.

What happens next to the hawk chick?

As well as it’s done so far, the hawk’s fate remains very much up in the air.

The eagles could decide to continue raising the chick as one of its own until it fledges, the point at which young birds’ have large enough feathers to fly.

It can take hawks weeks or a couple of months to fledge, while eagles don’t fledge until they’re around 3 months old.

Time will tell whether the hawk chick makes it to that point.

This story was originally published June 6, 2024 at 1:15 PM.

Kelsey Oliver

The Tribune

Kelsey Oliver is a reporting intern for The Tribune. She’s originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, and is a current graduate student at The Graduate Schools of Journalism and Public Health at UC Berkeley.