Red-Tailed Hawk Rises From The Ashes

The following story about a red-tailed hawk was submitted by All Things Wild Rehabilitation in Texas.

The juvenile red-tailed hawk was found in Waco, picked up by animal control, and transferred to All Things Wild. He was very emaciated, but that wasn’t his major problem. His feathers were really strange; we had never seen anything like it.

Some people thought he was molting, others thought he was a young bird and just growing feathers. The ATW staff thought the feathers had been singed by a fire but couldn’t figure out why his feet weren’t burned or how it happened.

To get the hawk back up to normal weight, we fed him EmerAid IC Carnivore twice a day by tubing the liquid nourishment down his throat. The diet seemed to work, because it wasn’t long before he was strong enough to go into an outside cage.

The mystery of what had scorched off his feathers was solved by a local wildlife rehabilitator. The culprit had been a landfill methane burner. According to an article we found on the Internet entitled Methane Burner Impacts on Raptors:

“Many industries use burners to flare off unwanted gasses. For example, solid waste landfills may burn off unwanted methane gas produced by decomposing organic matter…. Methane is typically burned away using either a flare-up or an enclosed flare…. Birds perched on or flying near a stack can be seriously injured or killed when a flare suddenly ignites. In some cases, birds may fly over or even through an almost invisible burner flame.”

We named the red-tail hawk Phoenix, because he had risen from the ashes. Unusually white, the staff researched and concluded he was a Krider’s red-tailed hawk, a pale color morph of the red-tailed hawk.

From the time Phoenix arrived in rehabilitation in February 2022, it took him 7 months to molt and re-grow new, healthy feathers. But when he did, he was a beautiful hawk and took to the skies above Waco while we shouted an admonition to stay away from the landfill.