Kids scream, and by kids I mean fledgling hawks trying to get their parents to feed them. And by scream I mean make a noise that sounds a lot like stepping, full-footed, in the dark, on a dog’s squeaky toy, during a late-night, bleary-eyed trip to the bathroom. A high-pitched “eeeeeee” that drops a register down to a slightly lower- pitched “eeeeeee.”
There has been a lot of that in recent weeks over Passover Lane and the Key West cemetery.
The screamer was a short-tailed hawk, one of the rarest birds in North America, with an estimated population of about 500, nearly all in Florida. They are pretty common in Central and South America, and they will occasionally cross the Mexican border into Texas (hence the “almost” all in Florida), but there is thought to be no crossover between the two populations. And while the North American population is small, it seems to have been holding steady for at least a century.
The thing about the Keys is, historically, excepting ospreys, the occasional bald eagle, and the occasional red-shouldered hawk, all the raptors vacate the area in the summer. It’s usually a little bit of a ghost town, birds of prey-wise. But in recent years something seems to have changed.
Short-tailed hawks bred in Central Florida in the summer, then migrated down to South Florida and the Keys in the winter. This was not always the understanding.
The first reports I can find of short-tails comes from the 1880s.
Short-tailed hawks come in two color morphs – light and dark. In Florida there are thought to be more light morph birds than dark morph, though in Central and South America, it’s thought the white morph is more prevalent. There is no intergradation as far as plumage goes. Birds are either one or the other. And you can’t identify their sex by looking at them.
For a long time it was believed that the two color phases were separate species. It wasn’t until March 1889, when W.E.D. Scott, curator of the museum of biology at Princeton University, found a nest near Tarpon Springs with both a light morph and a dark morph adult; collected (shot) them, and measured them, that it was understood they were the same species.
For a while after that ornithologists only knew that short-tails were in South Florida and the Keys in the winter. It was believed that they migrated out of the state, possibly even out of the country. No one knew where. But it turns out, they’d just slid on up to the middle of the state. With only about 200 breeding pairs spread out over that much land, it was easy to miss them. It didn’t help that they tended to build their nests high and on the edges of lakes or deep in cypress swamps.
Short-tailed hawks were never known to nest in the Keys. But over the last decade or so, I’ve had my suspicions, largely due to the fact I’ve seen them in every month of the year, including the ones they weren’t supposed to be here.
Some time in the summer of 2022 someone told me about a couple of hawks making a racket over on Passover Lane, where I only found an empty nest.
In the summer of 2023, a juvenile short-tail was hanging around the cemetery, making a racket. I went over and managed to catch sight of it once. Unfortunately it was electrocuted, probably on a power line. Key West Wildlife Rescue managed to capture the bird, but it eventually succumbed to its injuries.
In 2024 we documented the first short-tail nest in a Norfolk pine in the Meadows neighborhood of Key West, as well as a juvenile light morph bird, and both a light morph and a dark morph adult birds.
In late May of this year I was walking the dog around the cemetery when I briefly caught sight of a light morph short-tail from the corner of Frances and Olivia. A little while later on Angela Street, just past Catholic Lane, I caught sight of a dark morph bird. The dog was pretty happily sniffing some grass so I watched it for a while, hoping to see where it landed. But it caught a thermal and kept rising higher and higher. I watched it climb until my neck started to ache and the dog decided she would like to sniff something else now please.
Pretty much any time I’ve walked or ridden by there since, I’ve seen or heard at least one short-tail.
The volume, though, has apparently been increasing.
A couple weeks ago my friend Dave texted from Galveston Lane asking, “Mark, there’s a hawk flying around my neighborhood and screeching constantly. What’s all the ruckus about?” My friend Wendy said she heard them in the morning while walking her dog on Olivia. She also sent a poindexter emoji for me knowing what it was.
Arlo Haskell texted me a photo of a white morphed short-tail bathing in the new fountain at the Elizabeth Bishop House on White Street with the question, “What do we have here?”
Last week I ran into Rob, who I knew from my brief career as a pub quiz host. He was telling me about birds he thought were maybe broad-winged hawks breeding near his house. I asked if he lived near the cemetery. He said he did. I told him they were short-tails.
I’ve been buried in a long-term project and didn’t manage to give the birds any serious attention until this week, when I decided to go spend some time seeing how it was working out.
I set up just behind the USS Maine plot. Passover Lane and the trees above looked a little like a stage set.
The life history of short-tailed hawks is not all that well known. It’s known the male collects most of the sticks for the nest and the female does most of the construction; that the female does all the brooding while the male brings her food; that it takes 34 to 39 days for eggs to hatch. It’s unclear how long it takes for the young to fledge.
It’s known that the short-tailed hawk’s diet consists mostly of small birds (though I did see one take a very young and small iguana once on Frances Street). It is unknown how long their parents continue to feed them after they fledge, or how long before the young are capable of hunting on their own.
The bird I saw most recently was a young dark morph, speckled in the breast and underwing, flying low over the treetops and calling every few minutes. It would disappear for a while, then come back, occasionally landing in the same tree as the nest, but not on the nest. Mostly he would just fly over, as if he was checking in. I’m guessing it was five or six weeks old.
I caught sight of both of the adults, the light morph doing a flyover, then heading down to the Frances Street end of the cemetery, and the male flying over, but from way high up.
The scenario in my mind was that the parents were keeping an eye on their offspring, but also giving it some tough love, pushing it to fend for itself, and the juvenile was throwing a teenage temper tantrum about it. But honestly, that is just a guess.
Even when they are this close, the lives of short-tails are still mostly a mystery.
