A baby hawk is called an eyas, a term with roots in medieval falconry that has persisted in ornithology for centuries. The word applies broadly to any young hawk still dependent on its parents, though as the bird grows and passes through distinct developmental stages, other terms take over. Understanding the full vocabulary, from eyas to nestling to fledgling, reveals quite a bit about how hawks develop and what their early lives actually look like.
Where the Word Eyas Comes From
Eyas is one of those English words with a mangled history. It derives from the Old French “niais,” meaning a nestling hawk, which itself came from the Latin “nidus” (nest). When the French phrase “un niais” crossed into English, speakers misheard the word boundary and reattached the “n” to the article, turning “a nias” into “an eyas.” Linguists call this process misdivision, and it is the same thing that gave English the word “apron” (originally “a napron”) and “umpire” (originally “a noumpere”). The result is a word that looks nothing like its origin but has been standard in English since at least the fifteenth century.
In traditional falconry, eyas had a specific and practical meaning. It referred to a hawk taken from the nest before it could fly, to be raised and trained by a falconer. This distinguished the bird from a “passager,” a hawk trapped during its first migration, and a “haggard,” a wild-caught adult. Today, though, eyas is used more loosely by birders and ornithologists to mean any young hawk that has not yet fledged, regardless of whether anyone intends to train it.
The Stages of a Young Hawk’s Life
Hawks do not stay eyases for long. From the moment an egg hatches to the day a young hawk takes its first real flight, the bird passes through a series of stages, each with its own name. These are not arbitrary labels; each reflects a genuine shift in the bird’s behavior and physical condition.
- Hatchling: The bird has just broken out of the egg. Hawk hatchlings are altricial, meaning they are born nearly helpless, with closed or barely open eyes, minimal down, and no ability to regulate their own body temperature. They depend entirely on a parent (usually the female) for warmth and food.
- Nestling: Once a hatchling is a few days old and growing its first layer of down, it becomes a nestling. This is the stage most people picture when they think of a baby hawk: a fluffy, awkward-looking bird sitting in the nest while its parents bring food. Nestlings grow at a remarkable pace and begin sprouting their first true feathers within a couple of weeks.
- Brancher: Before a young hawk can truly fly, it starts climbing out of the nest and hopping along nearby branches. This is the brancher stage, and it is arguably the most precarious period in a hawk’s early life. Branchers have feathers but not strong flight muscles. They flap, hop, and sometimes tumble to the ground. Many calls to wildlife rehabilitators involve branchers that people assume have fallen and been abandoned, when in fact the parents are still nearby and feeding them.
- Fledgling: A hawk becomes a fledgling once it takes its first sustained flight from the nest or its perching spot. Fledgling does not mean the bird is independent. Young hawks remain dependent on their parents for food for weeks after fledging, gradually learning to hunt on their own. The fledgling period is a long apprenticeship, and the transition from being fed to self-sufficiency is one of the most dangerous stretches of a hawk’s life.
The eyas label technically overlaps with the nestling stage but is often used more broadly to encompass the entire pre-fledging period. You will hear birders and falconers use these terms with varying precision, and that is fine. The vocabulary reflects the bird’s development rather than rigid taxonomic categories.
How Fast Hawks Grow
The speed at which a hawk goes from hatchling to fledgling depends on the species, but the general pattern is startlingly fast compared to most mammals. Small hawk species like Sharp-shinned Hawks may fledge in as little as three to four weeks after hatching. Larger species like Red-tailed Hawks take roughly six weeks. The biggest North American hawk, the Ferruginous Hawk, has nestlings that remain in the nest for about 40 to 50 days before their first flight.
During the nestling period, growth is almost visible day to day. A Red-tailed Hawk hatchling weighs around 50 to 60 grams at birth, roughly the weight of a chicken egg. By the time it fledges, it may weigh over a kilogram, representing a roughly twentyfold increase in body mass in about six weeks. This pace demands enormous amounts of food, which places intense pressure on the parents.
What Happens Inside the Nest
The division of labor between hawk parents is sharp, especially early in the nesting cycle. Research on Ferruginous Hawks in New Mexico found that males delivered the vast majority of prey items, about 72%, and roughly twice the total prey biomass that females brought. But females tended to deliver larger individual prey items per trip. Males specialized in smaller prey like pocket gophers, while females brought disproportionately more cottontail rabbits when they did hunt.
The female’s primary role during the early nestling period was not hunting but staying at the nest to brood and feed the chicks. Females in that study spent about a third of recorded time at the nest, whereas males spent less than one percent of their time there. The male’s job was to deliver food; the female’s job was to tear it into small pieces and feed it to the nestlings, who cannot eat whole prey on their own. As the nestlings grew older and developed the ability to regulate their own body temperature, the female gradually left the nest more often and began hunting herself.1Journal of Raptor Research. Nesting Behavior, Provisioning Rates, and Parental Roles of Ferruginous Hawks in New Mexico
This pattern, where the male provisions and the female guards and feeds, is common across hawk species and is sometimes called the food-niche hypothesis. It allows each parent to specialize in what they do best during the most vulnerable phase of their offspring’s lives.
Sibling Rivalry in the Nest
Hawk nests are not peaceful places. Most hawk species lay two to four eggs, and the eggs hatch asynchronously, meaning the first egg hatches a day or two before the second, which hatches before the third. This gives older chicks a size advantage from the very beginning, and they use it. Older, larger nestlings tend to grab food first, push siblings aside, and in some species can injure or even kill younger siblings when food is scarce. Ornithologists call this siblicide, and in certain eagle and hawk species, it happens regularly.
The dynamics are not entirely brutal, though. A study of Ferruginous Hawk nests found that while first-hatched and second-hatched nestlings won more food through direct competition with siblings, the parents actively compensated by directing more food toward the youngest, last-hatched chick. The researchers concluded that the unequal food distribution created by sibling competition was offset by deliberate parental allocation, with parents apparently working to maximize the survival of all their offspring rather than letting the strongest monopolize everything.2Journal of Raptor Research. The Role of Sibling Competition and Parental Provisioning on Food Distribution among Ferruginous Hawk Nestlings
This finding challenges the simplistic view that hawk nests are survival-of-the-fittest arenas. Parents have a stake in keeping all their young alive, because each surviving fledgling represents a return on their enormous investment of time and energy. The youngest chick also serves as a kind of insurance policy: if an older sibling dies from disease or an accident, the youngest is there to carry the parents’ reproductive success forward.
Why So Many Young Hawks Do Not Survive
Despite all the parental care, mortality among young hawks is high. Across most raptor species, roughly half to two-thirds of fledglings do not survive their first year. The causes are a mix of natural challenges and human-caused hazards, and the balance between those categories is sobering.
A long-term study of female Cooper’s Hawks in an urban setting in New Mexico tracked the fates of 88 tagged birds that were recovered dead. Collisions of all types, with vehicles, windows, fences, and overhead power lines, accounted for the largest share of deaths regardless of age, with a combined probability around 32 to 45 percent of all known mortality. Anthropogenic causes collectively, including collisions, electrocution, poisoning, being shot, and entrapment in building ductwork, accounted for roughly 73% of first-year deaths and 68% of after-first-year deaths.3Journal of Raptor Research. Causes of Death of Female Cooper’s Hawks from an Urban Setting in New Mexico, USA
For young hawks specifically, the first few months after fledging are the deadliest. A fledgling learning to hunt is clumsy. It misjudges distances, flies into obstacles, and often fails to catch enough prey to sustain itself. Starvation is a real threat during this learning period. The Cooper’s Hawk data showed that for most causes of death, first-year birds had equal or higher mortality than older hawks, which makes intuitive sense: experience matters when you are navigating a landscape full of windows, cars, and power lines.
What to Do If You Find a Baby Hawk
Finding a young hawk on the ground is one of the most common situations that prompts people to search for information about baby hawks. In most cases, the right course of action is to leave the bird alone. If the bird has most of its feathers and is hopping around, it is likely a brancher going through the normal process of leaving the nest. Its parents are almost certainly nearby and will continue feeding it on the ground or on low perches.
If the bird is very young, covered mostly in down with few or no feathers, and the nest is visible and reachable, placing it back in the nest is safe. The widespread belief that parent birds will reject a chick that has been touched by humans is a myth. Hawks have a poor sense of smell and will not notice or care about human scent on their offspring. The bigger risk is that handling a nestling will prompt a defensive attack from the parents, who may dive at anything that approaches the nest.
There are situations that do call for intervention. If a young hawk is visibly injured, bleeding, or unable to stand, or if you know a parent has been killed, contacting a licensed wildlife rehabilitator is the right move. In the United States, it is illegal to keep a hawk, even a baby one, without a federal and state permit. Well-meaning people who try to raise a hawk at home almost always end up with a bird that is malnourished, improperly socialized, and unable to survive in the wild.
Hawk Terminology Beyond the Nest
Falconry has gifted English with a rich vocabulary for hawks at every life stage, and some of these terms have bled into general usage in ways people do not always recognize. A “tiercel” is a male hawk, roughly a third smaller than the female in most species, and the name comes from the Latin “tertius” (third), a reference to that size difference. A “haggard,” meaning a wild-caught adult hawk, eventually migrated into everyday English to describe someone who looks worn and exhausted, probably because wild-caught adult hawks were notoriously difficult to tame and often looked stressed during the process.
The word “hawk” itself covers a surprisingly broad range of birds. In strict taxonomic terms, true hawks belong to the genus Accipiter, which includes Sharp-shinned Hawks, Cooper’s Hawks, and Northern Goshawks. But in common North American usage, “hawk” also includes the buteos, the broad-winged soaring hawks like Red-tailed Hawks, Red-shouldered Hawks, and Ferruginous Hawks. Falcons, despite looking similar and filling a similar ecological niche, are not hawks at all; they are more closely related to parrots and songbirds than to hawks or eagles. So when someone asks what a baby falcon is called, the answer is still “eyas,” because the term originated in falconry and applies across the raptors that falconers traditionally flew. But biologically, the falcon and the hawk are not close relatives.
When Eyases Become Adults
A young hawk’s transition from dependent fledgling to independent hunter is gradual and does not happen at one clean moment. After fledging, most hawk species go through a period called the post-fledging dependence period, which can last anywhere from a few weeks to several months depending on the species. During this time, the young hawks follow their parents, beg loudly for food, and make increasingly competent attempts at hunting on their own. Parents may encourage independence by becoming less responsive to begging calls over time, or by dropping prey in flight for the young hawk to catch, a kind of training exercise that has been documented in several raptor species.
Plumage provides a visible marker of age in most hawks. Juvenile hawks typically have different feather patterns than adults, often with vertical streaking on the breast rather than the horizontal barring seen in mature birds. In Red-tailed Hawks, juveniles lack the iconic red tail entirely and instead have brown tails with narrow dark bands. It takes about a year for most hawks to molt into their adult plumage, and breeding usually does not begin until the second or third year of life. The young hawk that started as a helpless, downy eyas in a stick nest will spend its entire first year as an identifiable juvenile, still learning the skills it needs to eventually raise eyases of its own.
That first year is a sorting process. The hawks that survive it tend to be the ones that learned to hunt efficiently, avoided the collision hazards and predators that claim so many of their peers, and found territories with enough prey to sustain them. In urban environments, where Cooper’s Hawks and Red-tailed Hawks have increasingly settled, the learning curve includes navigating glass, traffic, and power lines alongside the natural challenges of finding food and avoiding larger predators like Great Horned Owls. For the young hawks that make it through, life expectancy improves considerably. A Red-tailed Hawk that survives its first year can reasonably expect to live another decade or more in the wild, a long tenure for a predator that started life as a blind, naked hatchling weighing less than a handful of coins.