One hot day in early June, a red-tailed hawk chick perched on the second-floor gutter of a Syracuse University sorority house, whistling plaintively for its parents.
The chick had fledged the previous day from its nest in a tall gingko tree across the street, perhaps 100 feet away. Now it seemed skeptical about this whole flying thing and wasn’t in any hurry to try it again.
Finally, the chick flapped its big fluffy wings and, with all the grace of a pillow tossed out of moving vehicle, flew to a nearby pine tree.
“Oh, good job, good job, you did it, you did it!” Shouted Anne Marie Higgins from the parking lot below. She pointed her camera at the pine tree and snapped a few photos.
Higgins, 69, a retired nurse practitioner from Syracuse, was there to ensure nothing bad happened to the chick. Fledglings are prone to running into windows and landing in busy streets.
The chick was just one of 11 chicks from five different red-tailed hawk nests scattered around SU and the near East Side that Higgins has been monitoring since early March.
Fledge watch is her busiest time. She shuttles from nest to nest, visiting each one twice a day and posting her observations and photos to her Red-Tailed Hawk Tales Facebook page.
Higgins is the hawks’ guardian, cheerleader, chronicler, benefactor, and human mother, all rolled into one.
“How do I do it? I don’t do anything else,” she joked. “This is my avocation. They’re my life now.”
Anne Marie Higgins at hawk headquarters in her home office. On her monitor Higgins is running the nest camera livestream on YouTube.Steve Featherstone | sfeatherstone@syracuse.com
Red-tailed hawk royalty
Of the 11 fledglings that Higgins took under her wing this year—the most ever for her—seven are descendants of red-tailed hawk royalty, SU-Sue and Otto.
SU-Sue and Otto began nesting on SU’s campus in 2012. They became international YouTube stars in 2017 after SU installed nest cameras and began livestreaming the pair’s chick-rearing exploits.
An SU alumnus, Higgins donated the cameras and operated them for six years along with a group of volunteers. She’s a regular presence on campus, which is how she met DeAnn Buss, an information systems director at SU who often stopped to watch SU-Sue and Otto during nesting season.
Buss and Higgins became friends and soon Buss was operating the nest cameras and helping Higgins rescue injured hawks from campus grounds.
“She just has so much love for those hawks,” said Buss, who has since retired from SU. “They’re like her children, really.”
SU-Sue died suddenly in January 2023; five days later, Otto died. Both hawks tested positive for H5N1, or avian flu, according to Cornell’s Animal Health Diagnostic Center where Higgins had taken the birds to be necropsied.
SU-Sue and Otto had raised 28 offspring at SU in 11 years, many under Higgins’ watchful eye. On her computer she maintained a spreadsheet of all their statistics. She named them, documented their milestones, and grieved for the ones that died.
But the deaths of SU-Sue and Otto marked one of the darkest periods of Higgins’ life.
“I was devastated,” she said. Her 19-year-old cat Vivi died around the same time, and she felt as though she didn’t have anything left.
The hawks’ deaths hit Buss hard, too, but not as deeply as it did her friend. For Anne Marie, said Buss, “it was like a death in the family.”
A framed picture of Anne Marie Higgins' soul mate and husband, Tim Higgins, sits on her kitchen counter. In 2009, Tim was diagnosed with acute leukemia and died 18 days later, weeks shy of the couple's 25th wedding anniversary.Steve Featherstone | sfeatherstone@syracuse.com
‘Two souls, one heart’
Red-tailed hawks are as beautiful as they are common. You’ve probably seen one perched on a dead tree branch on the side of a highway, rust-brown feathers glowing in the sun.
More than likely you’ve heard a red tail’s familiar raspy war cry on a movie soundtrack where it’s often substituted for bald eagles and other, less vocally talented raptors.
Anne Marie and her husband, Thomas ‘Tim’ Higgins, a Syracuse city court judge, were avid birders. Red-tailed hawks were one of their favorite birds, not least because they mated for life.
Anne Marie and Tim were soul mates.
“I knew the moment I met him,” said Higgins. “I just knew.”
In 2009, Tim was diagnosed with acute leukemia. He died 18 days later. He and Anne Marie had been married for nearly 25 years. It was as if part of her soul had been ripped out.
“We just had an extraordinarily close, loving relationship,” Higgins explained. “Ours just got better and better and better. Especially going through all the infertility stuff together, because that often drives people apart. We weathered the storm together.”
Higgins wears a heart-shaped silver locket on a silver cord around her neck. It’s engraved with the phrase ‘Two souls, one heart,’ and inside it is her husband’s ashes.
“He’s always with me,” said Higgins, lightly tapping the locket with her fingertip, “always, always.”
A juvenile red-tailed hawk looks for a landing spot in Oakwood Cemetery.Steve Featherstone | sfeatherstone@syracuse.com
A spiritual connection
Higgins’ devotion to red-tailed hawks transcends altruism.
She says she communicates with her husband’s spirit through the hawks. It began the summer after Tim’s death. She was staying at a cottage near Lake Ontario that they’d often rented when a red-tailed hawk appeared on the roof.
“Very unusual, because they’re not water birds, number one,” Higgins said. “It just hung out with me, and it had blue eyes. Hawks do not have blue eyes. And my husband did.”
Higgins detailed the hawk encounter, and many other signs and portents of her husband’s spirit— “positive coincidences,” she calls them—in a 2015 self-published memoir, ‘Dancing in Two Realms: A Love Story Beyond Death.’
One year later, she discovered SU-Sue and Otto. And her life ever since has been hawks, hawks, and more hawks.
“Well, I’ve got a zillion hawks now,” she chuckled. “He brought me to this life.”
One of Anne Marie Higgins' pair of ocicats plays in front of a poster of SU-Sue's and Otto's family tree. The pair of beloved red-tailed hawks died within days of each other in January 2023.Steve Featherstone | sfeatherstone@syracuse.com
‘She’s a force of nature’
Losing SU-Sue and Otto last year felt to Higgins almost like losing her husband again.
And once again, a red-tailed hawk rescued her from the depths of despair.
Days after SU-Sue and Otto died, Higgins spotted a hawk perched on a campus radio tower overlooking their hunting grounds in Oakwood Cemetery.
Based on similarities in plumage and behavior, Higgins believes the hawk was one of SU-Sue’s and Otto’s offspring. She named it Sarah in honor of SU alum Sarah Loguen, one of the first Black woman physicians in the US.
This past spring, Sarah and her mate raised two chicks in a campus neighborhood near Oakwood Cemetery. Two other pairs of red-tailed hawks related to SU-Sue and Otto also had chicks this year. One pair nested on a south campus light tower; the other pair nested in a gingko tree near Bird Library.
From breeding to hatching to fledging, Higgins chronicled every moment in the lives of the three SU red-tailed hawk families. She even operated a livestream from a new nest camera that she got up and running with help from the Syracuse mayor’s office, SU, and a Texas company specializing in wildlife camera installations.
Forty percent of the camera’s cost came out of Higgins’ own pocket; Matt Kosty, who owns three Wild Birds Unlimited stores in upstate NY, including two in Onondaga County, donated funds for the rest.
But money was the easy part.
“The hoops Anne Marie had to jump through to get that camera put up were pretty monumental,” Kosty said. “She’s a force of nature. She’s a tsunami. When she has her mind made up, she will manifest that thing.”
Electrical conduit runs up the trunk of a tall gingko tree on SU's campus where a pair of red-tailed hawks raised their first brood this spring. Anne Marie Higgins coordinated with the Syracuse Mayor's office, SU, and a professional installer to get a nest camera put in the tree.Steve Featherstone | sfeatherstone@syracuse.com
A red-tailed legacy continues
Tony Williams, Commissioner of Parks and Recreation and Youth Programs for the City of Syracuse, vividly remembers the first time he spoke to Higgins in January about putting a nest camera in a city park located on SU’s campus.
Williams knew nothing about birds, but he knew passion when he heard it.
“It sent chills down my back feeling her emotion,” Williams said, “which is an indication to how much Anne Marie cares. She does this just for the love.”
Crews snaked electrical conduit 50 feet up the trunk of a gingko tree where the hawks had made their nest. The pair, Oren and Ruth, were named after stand-out SU alumni Oren Lyons and Ruth Colvin.
So as not to disturb the hawks, installers then worked through the night to get the camera in place on March 18. Ruth laid her first egg the next day.
The camera feed went live four days later, just before Ruth laid her second egg. Higgins watched the momentous event from hawk headquarters in her home office. Two laminated memorial cards from her husband’s funeral rested on either side of her keyboard.
In the weeks that followed, thousands of people from more than 30 countries clicked on the livestream to watch Oren and Ruth raise their first brood.
“It’s wonderful for SU because they’ve got this legacy of these wonderful birds of prey that people are so in awe of and absolutely love following,” Higgins said. “It’s just heartwarming to share this beautiful continuation.”
Anne Marie Higgins strolls through Oakwood Cemetery, observing the many hawks she chronicles on her Red-Tailed Hawk Tales Facebook page.Steve Featherstone | sfeatherstone@syracuse.com
Hawk medicine
Nest cameras are valuable public education tools. They also have potential scientific value, especially when documenting new hawk parents like Oren and Ruth, said Chris Briggs, a biology professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
“We have good evidence that those first-time breeders tend to do poorly,” Briggs said. “We just don’t understand the why. That’s where cameras can fill in some of that data.”
Indeed, one of Oren and Ruth’s chicks died of unknown causes over Memorial Day weekend. Now that the other two chicks have fledged, the livestream features an empty nest. Meanwhile, Higgins does her daily rounds to make sure the young hawks are staying out of trouble.
Two weeks ago, passersby found one of Oren and Ruth’s juvenile offspring on the ground near Thornden Park. Higgins took it to Cornell’s wildlife veterinary hospital for evaluation—it was bleeding behind its eye—then to Page’s Wildlife Center in Manlius where it’s currently being rehabilitated. She expects to soon release it back into the wild.
Higgins has lately been spending more time in Oakwood Cemetery now that the juveniles from the other two SU hawk nests are expanding their range into SU-Sue and Otto’s old hunting grounds.
On a recent afternoon, she drove slowly through the cemetery, her car swaying in the narrow, rutted lanes. It’s familiar territory to Higgins. She knows every tree and monument where the hawks like to perch.
She parked near a fir tree with a dead crown from which SU-Sue and Otto once surveyed their realm. A few days earlier, Higgins had held a little ceremony at the base of the fir tree. She sprinkled the last of SU-Sue and Otto’s ashes on the ground and cried.
“It’s a very peaceful site,” Higgins said, sitting on a stone memorial bench beneath the fir tree. “It’s helpful to get hawk medicine. That’s what I call it. That’s what I get every day. It’s needed for all the woes.”
Never one to linger, Higgins got up from the bench and walked to her car. She needed to get home to feed her two 11-month-old cats before they tore up her house again.
“Holy moly do they drive me crazy,” she exclaimed. But she just rolled with it. Her capacity for love was boundless. Higgins laughed.
“I need some place to put my love other than hawks!”
READ MORE
Otto, Syracuse University’s widowed red-tailed hawk, dies five days after mate (newyorkupstate.com)
Syracuse courthouse mourns death of Judge Thomas Higgins Jr. - syracuse.com
Hawk watch: Three red-tailed hawk eggs hatch at Syracuse University (video) - newyorkupstate.com
Steve Featherstone covers the outdoors for The Post Standard, syracuse.com and NYUP.com. Contact him at sfeatherstone@syracuse.com or on Twitter @featheroutdoors. You can also follow along with all of our outdoors content at newyorkupstate.com/outdoors/ or follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/upstatenyoutdoors.