HawkWatch International searches Salt Lake City for escaped Harris’s hawk

Salt Lake City residents were asked to keep scanning the sky near 900 East and Simpson Avenue in Sugar House after Stax, HawkWatch International’s Harris’s hawk, flew away from the nonprofit’s refuge on June 29. Staff were working the neighborhood, watching for a moving silhouette high over the trees or a raptor heard before it came into view.

Stax has a distinctive call, and smaller birds can betray him by mobbing, crowding together and harassing a potential predator in the canopy. The clearest visual markers are the ones built into falconry gear: leather anklets, brown jesses, and a small band on his right leg. Stax is a Harris’s hawk, a medium-to-large raptor with dark brown plumage, chestnut shoulders and thighs, long yellow legs, and a black tail marked by a white band at the base and tip.

Stax is one of HawkWatch’s education ambassadors, the kind of live bird the organization uses for school programs and private events. He came to HawkWatch from a falconer after being wild-hatched, legally caught after fledging and learning to hunt while still under a year old. He later broke his leg while taking down a rabbit on a hunt.

HawkWatch International pairs education with long-term monitoring and scientific research around raptors as indicators of ecosystem health. An escape like Stax’s turns into a neighborhood search: a live bird can disappear fast into urban cover, then reappear only when someone notices the right tail band, the right jesses, or the wrong flock of smaller birds screaming at a hawk in the trees.