Habitat and Diet
This hawk lives mainly on insects such as locusts and giant centipedes, as well as small lava lizards, snakes, and rodents. It is not uncommon for it to take young marine and land iguanas, and sea turtle and tortoise hatchlings. This predator has also been spotted near nesting areas of Swallow-tailed Gulls, where it steals eggs as well as young. Even extremely rancid carrion is picked apart by their sharp, forceful beaks. Their feet and talons are also strong like those of the closely related Red-backed Hawk and White-tailed Hawk.
Hunting in groups of two or three, the hawks soar at a height of 50 to 200 meters in the sky. When one of the birds spots prey or a rotting carcass, they signal to the other members. The dominant hawk of the group feeds from the prey until it is satisfied, as the other hawks in the family group submissively wait their turn to feed. It prefers to perch on a lava outcrop or high branch when hunting, yet it also spends some of its time on the ground.
Fearless of man, the young especially being quite curious, they often wander around human camps and scavenge for scraps of food. In 1845, Charles Darwin wrote:
"A gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk out of the branch of a tree..."
Read more about this topic: Galapagos Hawk
Famous quotes containing the words habitat and/or diet:
“Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things.... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)