At the rear of the corporate campus where I work, we have a 250-foot-tall radio tower located among a field of large satellite antennas. About halfway up the tower is a platform that has for years been home to a nest for a couple of red-tailed hawks. They usually produce 1-3 new baby hawks every spring.
In mid April we observed the mother hawk staying on the nest pretty much 24-7, and by April 24th we had the first sighting of a hatchling. After confirming that the hatchling existed, I brought my telescope into work and set it up on a high floor of an adjacent building where we had a decent view of the nest (I built an 8-inch Dobsonian telescope several years ago from scratch — it took me a month of weekends). People were able to come by any time to take a look. I didn’t man it the whole time — I just left it there for people to look through.
We have a campus-wide cable television system that feeds our own TV networks (plus a few not ours like Comedy Central and the Weather Channel) to all offices so they can see anything that’s airing at any time for whatever reason. I know the engineer who runs that system, and we managed to get my telescope fed into the cable system. I have a small video camera that hooks up to the telescope focuser (where the eyepiece normally goes) — it was a gift from my Dad about a year ago.
So now everyone on campus could tune their office TV to channel 75 and watch the Hawk Channel. From what I heard, folks were glued to it. I singlehandedly destroyed campus productivity for the month of May.
We watched the hatchling grow from barely peeking over the edge of the [big, deep] nest, to being just as big as the adults, albeit with adolescent plumage. The mother hawk brought it kills (rats, pigeons, mmmm!) and the baby devoured them. It’s quite the gruesome sight, although I don’t think I ever laughed as hard as I did watching that baby gulp down the last big serving of rat.
About 6 weeks after we first spotted the hatchling, the now full-grown hawk disappeared from the nest. We saw it a few days later at the very top of the tower, and since then have seen it down nearer the ground, apparently learning to hunt, being bombarded by mockingbirds.