Two broad-winged hawks made their nest so high above ground that Laurie Goodrich couldn’t see inside until linemen from PPL ascended in a bucket truck and set up a camera.

The first photos showed three baby hawks, their feathers white and their eyes black circles.

Amid the pine boughs 80 feet above a rural road in New Ringgold earlier this summer, the babies perched in a line, from shortest in front to tallest at back.

They were 12 to 14 days old in late June.

Their mouths were open, as if waiting for their mother and father to arrive with food.

“It’s a busy time to be a parent when trying to supply hungry mouths,” said Goodrich, a senior research biologist at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton.

Mom and dad have brought chipmunks for the babies to eat, but they also delivered voles, other birds and snakes that they snared in the forest.

Goodrich wanted to see what prey the hawks caught when she asked PPL to make a special service call.

The camera that PPL linemen Tim Moyer and Dennis Hartman installed records video of what happens in the nest from dawn to dusk.

Goodrich downloads the video every other day. She and colleagues plan to spend the fall and winter watching every minute of the footage.

They will note how many minutes adults spend in the nest, how many food deliveries they make daily and how the weight of the young hawks changes.

Broad-winged hawks have been known to hunt as far as a half-mile from their nests. Goodrich hopes the study will help her discover the hawk’s habitat needs, such as how much unbroken forest they require and how roads and other developments affect them.

Of all raptors that fly over Hawk Mountain, broad-winged hawks pass in the greatest numbers. Spotters, for example, counted 2,813 of them on Sept. 17, 2011.

But the Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas conducted from 2004 to 2009 showed nests declined from the atlas compiled between 1983 and 1989, especially in southeastern counties.

Scientists don’t know why broad-winged hawks vanish as the forest gets fragmented.

“Part of what may happen is as the forest is carved into smaller chunks, the broad-wings are not there, perhaps, because other species such as red-tailed hawks are there,” Goodrich said.

Broad-winged hawks arrive in Pennsylvania in mid-April and start building nests. The female lays from two to four eggs and incubates them most of the time while the male brings her food.

After the eggs hatch, both

parents supply food to the young and redecorate the nest with fresh greenery, which Goodrich said might ward off insect


At first, the adults rip the food into bite-size chunks, but in a few weeks the young are able to eat the whole prey.

Within 28 days, the young start to fly so the fledglings in the nest in Summit Hill might take flight this week.

Even after learning to fly, they will return to the nest or trees nearby and accept food from mom and dad for a few more weeks.

“It’s a dangerous time. They need to learn to hunt, to fly and to negotiate roads,” Goodrich said.

Before the young depart for winter homes somewhere between Mexico and Peru this fall, Goodrich hopes to fit some of them with transmitters.

The transmitters and the fees to track them by satellite cost $5,000 per bird.

Just as PPL loaned a bucket truck and the linemen volunteered their time to plant the camera, contributions will help the next phase of the research.

Hawk Mountain obtained a grant from the Pennsylvania Game Commission. The sanctuary also received $30,000 from donors, including people who gave to a campaign on, an Internet fundraising site that nonprofit groups use.

The cost of satellite tracking is daunting, Goodrich said, but so is the information gleaned, such as how much time the hawks spend on migration, what type of habitats they stop at along the trip and their ultimate destinations.

“We don’t know where the Pennsylvania birds (spend the) winter,” she said.