Martyn Stewart Part I

BirdNote^®

Martyn Stewart Part I
Rough-legged Hawk

Written by Adam Sedgley

This is BirdNote!
[Call of the Rough-legged Hawk]
What would BirdNote be without the sounds of birds, like this Rough-legged Hawk? We owe a lot to the temerity of the nature recordists who travel the world to document the calls and songs of birds. Recordist Martyn Stewart describes how he obtained this call of the Rough-leg, that nests on the tree-less Arctic tundra.
 [Call of the Rough-legged Hawk, run throughout]
“The Rough-legged Hawk—I had seen this on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for a couple of days, and …uh, I noticed that it was nesting or maybe roosting on a ledge on the foothills of the coastal plain. The tundra is so difficult to walk on at the best of times so it took probably a couple of days to get to the foothills which is part of the Brooks Range. And when I got to the top, the male and female were obviously nesting. Whether it was eggs or nestlings I couldn’t see, but the female started to bomb me, and the male would watch over the episode of bird-chases-recordist. The female came down at me probably four or five times, swooping just to protect her nest. So the difficulty on the mountain ledge, as it was there, is … these ravines, with lots of loose shale. And you kind of look down and say, ‘Whoa, this is dangerous stuff!’” [Call of the Rough-legged Hawk]
To see a photo of this bird and all we feature on the show, come to our website, BirdNote.org. I’m Frank Corrado.
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Rough-legged Hawk call recorded and provided by Martyn Stewart, naturesound.org
Interview with Martyn Stewart by A. Sedgley and J. Kessler, May 30, 2007
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2010 Tune In to Nature.org          August 2010

ID# 083007martyn1-2KPLU     stewartm-01