03/08/2026
This year’s Swainson’s Hawk chick being fed having recently fledged the nest. We bred the species for the first time in 1994.
That same winter mass deaths of Swainson’s Hawks were recorded in their wintering grounds in southern South America. Many thousands of birds having died, unintentionally poisoned by a highly toxic to birds insecticide. Fortunately breeding ground monitoring and pioneering raptor tagging and tracking helped discover this and a chemical already banned in most of the world was eventually removed. Today the Swainson’s Hawk has largely recovered, but without such action and intervention could already have become extinct in the wild.
