Roanoke hawk too fat to fly: vets solve driveway mystery – she'd been eating the neighbours' chickens
A red-shouldered hawk found stranded in a driveway near Roanoke, Virginia, had nothing wrong with her – except that weeks of snacking on the neighbours' free-range chickens had made her too heavy to take off.
When a hawk turns up sitting in your driveway, refusing to fly, you fear the worst. In Roanoke, Virginia, the truth was much less tragic and much more relatable.
The adult female red-shouldered hawk was found grounded about a mile from the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center. Vets checked her for broken bones, lead poisoning, eye problems, head injuries, starvation and bruising. Everything was normal. The diagnosis? She was, in the centre’s words, “too darn fat to fly”.
Stock photo: a red-shouldered hawk – not the actual bird. Photo: Paul Danese / CC BY-SA 2.0 (Flickr via Wikimedia Commons).
She weighed over 900g (about 2lb), nearly a pound heavier than a normal female. “We couldn’t even palpate her keel due to the heavy layer of fat covering it,” the centre said.
AI illustration. (Spot Gaz, our gorilla, hiding somewhere in this picture.)
After ruling out a lost falconry bird or someone feeding her, staff asked the finder whether any neighbours kept free-range chickens. A couple of weeks later the answer came back: yes – and they had been vanishing “at an alarming rate”. “This queen was picking off the buffet of easy prey set out before her, eating her fill, and then snoozing in the trees nearby until she was ready to eat again,” the centre said.
AI illustration.
She is now on a weight-loss diet. It’s funny, the centre admitted – unless you’re one of the chickens – but a hawk that can’t fly is an easy target. Its advice: don’t feed wildlife, “directly OR indirectly”, and cover your chicken runs.
Reported by UPI and KTLA, from a post by the Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center.
