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Reverence for Raptors Page 2 of 4 There's controversy about that. Old World vultures are definitely raptors, and New World vultures - - like the black vulture, the turkey vulture and the California condor -- are also classified as raptors, but many ornithologists now believe that they are actually more closely related to storks. Farmers hate raptors, right? Because they swoop down and fly away with chickens and sheep? Many people believe that, but it usually just isn't true. Golden eagles can't lift more than their weight into the air, and they only weigh io pounds. Ared-tailed Hawk only weighs 2 1/2 to 3 pounds. But aren't red-tailed hawks called "chicken hawks"? Yes, but they can only carry a small chicken. Red-tails are also blamed for many chicken kills that they didn't do. Cooper's hawks are more likely to take chickens. They watch and wait from a perch, then they swoop in and grab a small chicken and return to their perch to eat it. But everyone looks up in the sky and sees red-tails soaring above, and so they are blamed. Red-tails are generalists in their diet: They eat gophers, rats, mice, rabbits and a lot of snakes. I have seen them flying with gopher snakes in their talons, and we've seen a dead rattlesnake in a red-tail's nest. How many raptors live in the Bay Area? There are i4 species of raptor that live and nest locally. Another five species are only seen during the fall migration -- from mid-August to mid-December, maybe 25,000 to g5,ooo raptors fly over the Bay Area. The rough-legged hawk that breeds in the Arctic migrates south all across the United States, and the entire population of Swainson's hawks migrates from Northern California and the Great Basin all the way to Argentina. We have about 250 volunteers who work every season collecting this data. What are the goals of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory? The GGRO studies raptor migration in our "Hawkwatch" to develop data so that we can influence land-use decisions, because the biggest threat to raptors is human encroachment. We promote public awareness of raptors because we're dedicated to conserving them in healthy populations. Your 25o volunteers -- who are they? Our volunteers are businesspeople, housewives, plumbers, writers, financial and computer types. Some are bird-watchers, but many are just interested in raptors. When you get close to these birds, you just get hooked. http://www.sfgate.com/cai-bin/article.c~i?file=/g/a/~~(1~/n5/~~/„rha„a.,;.,,at nTr R~~.,,A=„ ~~~~i~nn~