Fledgling Red-tailed Hawk: Kennebunk, Maine, USA, August 2025 — So a longish story about this newly fledged Red-tailed Hawk. I was on my e-trike on the way to the beach, only about a half mile from home, coming down into a little dip where a stream crosses under the road by the new (unfinished) Rachel Carson NWR headquarters, when I heard a Red-tailed Hawk calling loudly overhead. A big adult Red-tail flew out of the trees ahead of me at the bottom of the dip and off over the buildings toward the river behind, but one was still calling close so I stopped. I searched the heavy pine where the call seemed to be coming from but only saw another large adult when it flew out and up the stream in the opposite direction. Ah well. Still there was a hawk calling, somewhere deeper in the forest…not as loud, but there. And then it flew out and up into the top of another tall pine at the brow of the hill back toward home. It bounced around in the dead branches up there until it found a perch and settled down. It was actively calling and I thought maybe one of the adults would come to tend to it, so I got my little collapsible stool off the trike and took a seat in the shade against the fence that will be the Rachel Carson fence when they finish and open the Visitor Center. I watched that hawk like a hawk, as they say, for almost 2 hours, waiting for it to do something interesting or for one of the parents to come back. Of course I took just under 600 photos of that hawk doing nothing much of anything while waiting, and I have a photo of about every pose it struck. (Some of which you will probably see before the week is out.) These two shots are of it at its most active, when calling. When it finally did decide to do something, of course it was the last thing I expected. It took off and flew right straight at me, passing over my head at about 3 feet, just clearing the fence, and landed on the ground at the base of a tree about 30 feet beyond the fence. I had my camera ready for action, but I was not ready for that. It was up in a further tree behind the fence by the time I got fully focused on it again. Still, a great time. Sony a6700. Tamron 50-400 at 600mm equivalent. Program mode with my birds and wildlife in action modifications. Processed in Photomator.