Answers About Raptors in New York, Part 3
22.05.12
Jessica and JLG,
Your questions have to do with mating systems and mate choice: monogamy (one male, one female), polygyny (one male, many females), polyandry (one female, many males) and promiscuity (no real pair bonds).
Let’s look at monogamy, the most commonly occurring mating system in birds. Does the pair mate for one clutch, one year, or for life? If the pair mates for life and one of the pair dies, does the survivor mate again, and how quickly?
Red-tailed hawks are monogamous, and they usually maintain pair bonds until death of a partner. The acquisition of a new mate can happen quickly after the death of a member of the pair. This behavior is typical and occurs in rural as well as in urban hawks and has been documented since the 1930s — see “Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds .”
We have seen this happen with Pale Male, the famous Fifth Avenue hawk, whose nesting behavior since 1990 has been keenly observed and well documented. He has had a series of mates, but only one at a time. He nested with each female until her death. We get to know these magnificent animals, and while it is easy to interpret their behavior by human standards, hawks behave like hawks and not like people. If another potential mate is nearby and available, courtship begins. The rapid acquisition of a new mate does not mean that the male was not waiting for his mate to return. It means that the resource was available, in this case, the new female, and the timing was right.
Source: New York Times (blog)
