Photo: Cooper’s Hawk by Shawn Weber/Audubon Photography Awards
“Urban Raptors: Seattle’s Adaptable Cooper’s Hawks”
Presented by Ed Deal from Seattle’s Urban Raptor Conservancy
Wednesday, April 17, 2024, 7:00 p.m.
Dungeness River Nature Center, Rainshadow Hall
Free to attend.
Thirty years ago, in a somewhat mysterious development, Cooper’s Hawks began colonizing urban and suburban landscapes throughout the US, developing a tolerance for living in proximity to humans. In twelve years of recent study, their population in Seattle has tripled. Ed Deal, from Seattle’s Urban Raptor Conservancy, will provide fascinating insights into these common but elusive raptors.
You would think someone born in Cooper Hospital and raised in Audubon, NJ would be a child prodigy birder. But Ed’s conversion came in mid-life, after taking a hawk ID class in 1991. He went on to volunteer on fall migration hawk banding projects all over Washington and the rest of the country. He has over thirty years of experience studying and banding Peregrine Falcons in the San Juan Islands and the concrete wilderness of Seattle. For the last 12 years he has also worked with a group of volunteers studying the expanding urban population of Cooper’s Hawks in Seattle. He holds a Federal Master Raptor Banding Permit, is a graduate of the Seattle Audubon Master Birder Program and a recovering lister. If you want to know anything about raptors and especially urban raptors, this is your guy.
Photo: Ed Deal at Seattle Urban Raptor Conservancy