Avian Suites

06/19/2026

06/19/2026

In late May 2017, a pair of bald eagles in Sidney, British Columbia, raided a red-tailed hawk nest, carried two hawk chicks back to their own nest, and dropped them in with three eaglets. One chick was eaten. The other one bounced up and started begging for food.

The adult eagles fed it. They raised it alongside their own young for the rest of the season. It fledged successfully on June 22. Birders nicknamed it Spunky. The mayor of Sidney proclaimed Bald Eagle-Hawklet Day.

The nest sat on Summerset Place in Roberts Bay, inside the Shoal Harbour Migratory Bird Sanctuary about thirty kilometers north of Victoria. The eagle pair had been nesting at that specific location for twenty-six years. They were experienced parents that typically raised two or three eaglets per season. They were also efficient predators. Red-tailed hawks nest in the same territory, and bald eagles regularly prey on hawk chicks.

The dominant theory among the biologists who studied the case is that the adults hit a hawk nest, grabbed both chicks, and brought them home to feed their eaglets. Somewhere between arrival and consumption, the surviving hawk chick opened its mouth and screamed.

That scream is what flipped the switch. David Bird, an emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University who was living in Sidney at the time, told CBC that the hawk bounced up and started begging for food right away. The begging posture, the open mouth, the upturned beak, all of it closely resembles what an eaglet does when it wants to be fed. The adult eagles' parental instincts fired. Instead of tearing the hawk apart, they stuffed fish into its mouth.

The hawk was roughly three weeks old when it was first spotted in the nest. The eaglets were around nine weeks. The size difference was enormous. A red-tailed hawk is about one-quarter the size of a bald eagle, and these eaglets already had weeks of growth on the newcomer. Experts predicted the eaglets would kill it through sibling aggression, the way larger raptor chicks routinely kill smaller nest mates. Spunky survived.

David Hancock of the Hancock Wildlife Foundation, who monitored the nest with video cameras, said the hawk had one thing in its favor: proof to be a survivor. Most eaglets are aggressive. This hawk proved that audacity gets you some things.

Spunky ate what the eagles ate. It developed what Hancock described as an eagle-like affinity for fish, a food that red-tailed hawks do not normally hunt. It was observed stealing a flounder from one of the eaglets and flying away from the nest with it. It also displayed mantling behavior, spreading its wings over food to hide it from the other birds, a hawk instinct that eagles do not typically use. It was a hawk acting like an eagle in some ways and a hawk in others, sorting out an identity crisis in real time at the top of a tree in a suburban bird sanctuary.

The real question biologists raised was not whether Spunky would survive the nest. It was what would happen after. Bald eagles migrate north to Alaska after the breeding season. Red-tailed hawks do not. They stay in the region and hunt rodents, rabbits, and snakes. Spunky had been raised on fish by eagles that were about to leave for a destination hawks do not follow. Its adoptive family was going to fly away, and the hawk would need to figure out how to be a hawk with no hawk to teach it. Hancock did not give up hope that the young hawk's instincts would eventually override the eagle programming.

Spunky fledged on June 22 and left the nest area. The mayor of Sidney, Steve Price, who lived directly across the street from the nest tree, threw a block party. Birders who had been coming from around the world to watch the nest through telescopes attended. Hotels and restaurants in Sidney reported a measurable boost from the foot traffic.

The story did not end in Sidney. This was the third case Hancock had documented of bald eagles raising red-tailed hawk chicks. In 2022, it happened again on Gabriola Island near Nanaimo, BC. We**am footage captured the exact moment: a mother eagle dropped a hawk chick into the nest as food for her eaglet. The chick hit the nest, came alive, and started begging. By nightfall the mother was feeding both birds equally. The eaglet watched the whole thing and did nothing.

A bald eagle can kill a red-tailed hawk in seconds. It outweighs the hawk by a factor of four. It takes hawk chicks from the nest as prey on a regular basis. But the begging call of a raptor chick works across species lines. The mouth opens, the head tilts back, the cry goes up, and something in the adult predator's brain reads it as offspring instead of food. The difference between a meal and an adoption is one sound made at the right moment by an animal small enough to be swallowed whole. Spunky made the sound. The eagle that carried it home to be eaten raised it instead, fed it fish for six weeks, and watched it fly away into a life it was never supposed to have.

Source: Hancock Wildlife Foundation. CBC News, August 2017. National Geographic, July 2017. Washington Post, June 2017. BBC News, June 2017. American Eagle Foundation. David Bird, McGill University.

06/19/2026

An orphaned two-year-old killer whale was found swimming alone near a ferry dock in Puget Sound, 300 miles from her family, emaciated, sick, and approaching boats for company. Scientists identified her by her voice. They captured her, treated her, and drove her north on a jet catamaran to the waters off Vancouver Island. Her grandmother's pod arrived within twenty-four hours to take her back. Twenty-one years later, she leads her own family group with two calves.

Her designation was A73. Her nickname was Springer. She was born around 2000 into the Northern Resident killer whale community that summers in the waters off northern Vancouver Island. Her mother, Sutlej, died sometime before the summer of 2001. Orca calves nurse for at least two years and stay with their mothers for life. A two-year-old without a mother in a species that organizes its entire social structure around the mother-calf bond is an animal running out of time.

On January 14, 2002, Springer was spotted near the Vashon Island ferry dock in central Puget Sound. She was eleven feet long, underweight, covered in a skin rash, and carrying intestinal parasites. She was swimming alone in one of the busiest shipping lanes on the West Coast, hundreds of miles south of any Northern Resident territory, in water that her population almost never enters.
She was also approaching boats.

An orca that approaches boats is an orca developing a bond with the wrong species. The behavior accelerates. The animal begins following vessels, rubbing against hulls, positioning itself near propellers. We covered what happens next on this page when we wrote about Luna, the young Southern Resident male who was found alone in Nootka Sound, approached boats for years while authorities argued about whether to intervene, and was killed by a tugboat propeller in 2006. Luna and Springer were the same situation. Orphaned calves, alone, bonding with humans because no orca was there to bond with.

Springer's outcome was different because people acted before the argument was settled.

Researchers identified her through her calls. Killer whale pods produce unique vocal dialects passed from mother to calf. Helena Symonds at OrcaLab, a research station on Hanson Island in Johnstone Strait, recognized a call in Springer's recordings that she had heard from only one family group, the A4 pod. Springer was making her dead mother's sounds in a body of water where nobody from her family could hear them.

Photo identification confirmed it. Marilyn Dahlheim at NOAA matched saddle patch photographs from Puget Sound to images of A73 taken during surveys in Southeast Alaska. Graeme Ellis with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans verified the match. The orphan had a name, a family, and a home address. The family was in British Columbia. The orphan was in Washington.

The debate over what to do with her consumed six months. Some groups argued she should be left alone. Some argued she should be placed in a marine facility. Seven nonprofit organizations formed the Orphan Orca Fund and passed an immediate resolution that no funds could be used to send Springer to captivity. NOAA convened an independent panel of whale scientists. The panel recommended rescue, rehabilitation, and relocation. NOAA announced the decision on May 24.

On June 12, 2002, a team captured Springer in Puget Sound and moved her to a sea pen in Manchester, Washington. Veterinarians treated her worms and skin condition. She gained weight. Her behavior around boats was monitored and discouraged. On July 14, she was loaded onto a high-speed catamaran and transported north through the Strait of Georgia and Johnstone Strait to D**g Chong Bay near Telegraph Cove on the north end of Vancouver Island. The Namgis First Nation was there to welcome her home.

She was released into open water. Within twenty-four hours, her grandmother's pod arrived. Springer joined them and swam north.
By the summer of 2005, researchers confirmed she was fully integrated into the Northern Resident community and behaving like a normal, healthy whale. She was hunting, socializing, and traveling with her relatives as if the year and a half alone in Puget Sound had never happened.

In 2013, eleven years after her rescue, Springer was photographed off the central British Columbia coast with a calf at her side. Spirit, designated A104. In 2017, she was seen with a second calf. Storm, designated A116. The orphan that had been swimming alone near a ferry dock at age two was now a mother of two, leading her own matrilineal group, the A73s, through the same waters her own mother had traveled before she died.

Lance Barrett-Lennard, a senior research scientist at the Vancouver Aquarium's Marine Mammal Research Program, called it testimony to both the resiliency of killer whales as a species and to the wonderful things humans can do when we work together on behalf of, rather than against, nature.

Springer is the only killer whale in history to be successfully rescued, rehabilitated, and reunited with a wild pod. Luna was not. Two orphaned orcas, same species, same situation, same coast, separated by four years. One was rescued in time. One was not. Springer has two calves and a family. Luna is dead. The difference between the two outcomes was not biology. It was whether the people arguing about what to do made the decision before the tugboat did.

Source: NOAA Fisheries / Ocean Wise / The Whale Trail / Orca Conservancy / NOAA Southern Resident Connections.

06/18/2026