words and photos by Melissa McMasters
At the risk of incurring a little judgment, I’ve always been a fan of soap operas. When the real world doesn’t make sense, it’s nice to escape into a universe where one character’s biggest problem is that he’s not sure the common ancestor he shares with his crush is far enough away on the family tree for them to date each other. My favorite part about soaps is that you can dip in and out of them for months or years at a time and it takes very little effort to catch up to what’s going on. This is despite things changing at such a rapid pace that there’s an acronym for the common practice of recasting young characters with older actors so they can get more involved in the storylines. (That’d be SORAS, or Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome. It’s why most adult characters have parents who are only 5-10 years older than they are!)
It feels like I’ve been witnessing some real-life SORASing over the past few weeks, as I’ve tried to untangle the lives and loves of the Old Forest’s resident red-shouldered hawks (a.k.a. Buteo lineatus). These raptors don’t molt into their red shoulders or bellies until fall of their second year, so a young bird we see in May will appear to have been recast with a different actor by November. I had been under the mistaken impression that the pair we watched nest-building in 2024 were still ruling the roost, but in the past few weeks I’ve realized things are far more complicated than that. I’m not gonna say that we’ve reached the evil-twin part of our tale, but there are some characters who look suspiciously alike…
Let’s imagine a dramatic music cue that flashes us back to February 2024.
A big, beautiful female (I’ll call her Bertha) gathers sticks to build a nest in the sycamore along the golf path between holes 2 and 3. Her mate, who is the tiniest member of his species that I have ever seen, can be heard regularly screaming throughout this quadrant of the forest. I’ll call him Pops. He’s a good dad.
One day, after Bertha and Pops had constructed a nice sturdy nest, I went over to check on them and quickly realized I’d walked into chaos. Both hawks were screaming bloody murder, and so was a much larger red-tailed hawk, who was circling their nest with obvious ill intent. Dramatic freeze frame: a villain had entered the story! Bertha’s earrings were coming off and she was ready to fight. But thanks to Pops’s persistence, the pair held their own against this intrusion and eventually chased the beast out of their airspace. But in the days ahead, I didn’t see much of our supercouple. I feared they’d abandoned their nest, probably because the bigger hawk had raided it and no eggs had survived.
But in late April, we started seeing Bertha fly back and forth to the nest. And in May, a little baby dinosaur poked its head up. Our duo was successfully raising a chick!
We watched the new chick’s progress as best we could with the leaves obscuring what had been a clear view during the winter. We hoped it had fledged successfully, but it was six months before we knew for sure. Welcome to SORAS, step one: the fluffy white baby was now a child setting out in the world.
The young hawk was quite small, so I just assumed it was a male since female raptors are generally larger than their male counterparts. But this one also had Pops’s genes, so maybe it was guaranteed to be a little nugget no matter its sex.
The winter of 2025 was quiet; the Pops and Bertha show had moved to a channel we didn’t subscribe to. (By this I mean that they didn’t reuse the 2024 nest, probably because it had been well-scouted by the red-tailed hawk. They appeared to build their new one in the area behind the fence on Zoo property, so we weren’t able to check it out up close.) But winter did bring us a new character: a handsome male with a snowy face I’ll call Ralph. His preferred courtship technique was picnics on the Greensward.
I did catch up with Pops and Bertha’s offspring one more time in May 2025. The bird was experiencing the awkward hair days so common among teens trying very hard to blend in, but I was happy to see it doing well.
And that brings us here, now–February 2026. In last fall’s biggest storyline, the fence came down, and our ability to glimpse the affairs of the hawks got a big boost. On the new trail we added in this section of forest, I soon spotted Ralph with his petite frame and white face. Would he be able to find a lady to court in this small territory that was presumably the domain of Bertha and Pops? My question was quickly answered.
After an energetic burst of screaming, I watched Ralph fly over to a tall tree, and when he perched, there was a second tail beside his! He had brought a gift to a female. He quickly fled the scene, but she was occupied with her rodent so I was able to get a good look at her.
This female was pretty similar in size to Ralph–in order words, not as robust as I remembered Bertha being. Could it be…Bertha’s daughter? The 2024 chick would have undergone its molt into adult feathers in fall 2025, and I hadn’t seen it since May. The timeline was really adding up. But where did that leave our original heroes? Where were Bertha and Pops?
As I was trying to sort this out, the daily cacophony just got more complicated. One gray day, I watched two hawks circling each other over the Green Trail. One of them screeched loudly and occasionally dived into the other, until eventually they repaired to two different trees. This was a courtship display, a “sky dance” put on by the male to impress the female. But when I got a look at the male perched, it wasn’t Ralph or Pops–it was a sub-adult, still with streaky brown chest feathers instead of the rust-colored suit of the adults.
The female, though–she looked familiar. This was a chunky bird, bigger than the one I’d watched accepting a rodent gift earlier in the week. I can never know for sure since none of these birds are banded, and I’m engaging in storytelling rather than science here. But I’d like to think this is our legacy heroine, Bertha.
Only a couple of days later, there was a real ruckus on the Green Trail: four or five red-shouldered hawks all circling and yelling in the same vicinity (and one bored turkey vulture whose storyline had been backburnered and was looking for some drama). Bertha was sitting calmly next to a young male who was losing his mind at the other hawks flying above them. I did the best I could to grab photos of all the hawks flying. There were multiple juveniles, and no sign of my beloved Pops. Since it’s unlikely Bertha would throw over her existing mate for a sub-adult unless he was no longer available, I have to conclude that Pops has passed away. RIP, Short King. I hold out hope for a soap-worthy resurrection next summer.
Over the next week, on three separate occasions I almost walked right into a hawk on the new trail. This was before I had spent a number of hours I’m not going to admit to poring over photos of all these hawks, their bill shapes, their head colors, and the lengths of their tail feathers to try and figure out who was who. (“This one has a particularly robust lower mandible!” is a thing I said to myself yesterday.) I wasn’t sure if this hawk was male or female, because its size wasn’t offering any clues. I was used to Pops and Bertha, whose size difference was so pronounced that in their photo shoot for Soap Opera Digest, Pops would have had to stand on a box. This must be one of our newer pair, and since it has a brown face and not a white one, this is Pops and Bertha’s daughter.
But what really cracked the code was a little love in the afternoon. On Tuesday of this week, Kim and I were walking right underneath the sycamore where Pops and Bertha had built their nest in 2024. It’s crumbled to bits now; no hawks will be born there this year unless someone wants to put a lot of work in. We’d heard one hawk cry (which turned out to be some blue jay comedians working on their impressions) and then another, and we followed the second one to this hawk perched low along the path. Once again, I assumed I was looking at a male because my female search image was the substantial Bertha. But I was wrong!
Just as the hawk began giving a high-pitched whine, Kim said from over my shoulder, “There’s another one coming!” It was Ralph, and he had come a-courtin’. What follows is a small snippet of the first hawk love scene I’ve ever witnessed. (Mercifully, it was pretty brief.)
Afterward, they sat together for a moment, and the female puffed up to outrageous proportions. I’ve never seen a hawk get almost totally round before. Ralph flew off to sit in a nearby tree, and she remained behind, preening her chest feathers as we watched. A gorgeous lady who loves a feather boa, doesn’t move unless she absolutely needs to, and is That Chick? Our girl officially has a name: Mariah.
Both Kim and I felt like it would be nice of Mariah’s gentleman caller to bring her a treat, but he eventually disappeared. After a few minutes, though, Mariah made the same cry she had when he approached the first time. I’m used to raptor fledglings making this sound when their parents are approaching with food, but apparently it applies to adults, too: Ralph had brought her another rodent! He handed it off to her on a nearby stump, made sure she had it secured, and then headed back out again while she enjoyed the spoils of his efforts.
What will happen next? Will all the lookalike interlopers continue to fight over Bertha even though she’s fallen for a young cutie? Perhaps she’ll have a chick and be forced to take a paternity test (the results of which will inevitably be switched by this season’s villain; my money’s on a yellow-billed cuckoo). Will Pops make a dramatic return from what seemed like death but was actually a kidnapping orchestrated by someone who wanted to take his place? We’ll be tuning in to every episode.
