Profiles

Fishing for Hawks: Trapping Raptors with Adam Baz

AB8 Adam Baz is a bird biologist, photographer, and outdoorsman based in Portland, OR. His fieldwork studying bird populations takes him throughout the mountains of the west. The photo essay below takes us through a day on the job, trapping hawks on the slopes of Mt. Hood.

The morning commute. Our trapping station is located on the southern flanks of Mt. Hood in Oregon. The Cascade mountains form a north-south running ridge system that migratory raptors follow on their voyage to warmer wintering grounds.

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Eyes to the sky.

Equipment inside the blind.

Non-native birds are used as live "lure birds" to attract raptors. Tethered to strings and pulleys, and protected by leather vests, we operate the lure birds like marionettes. Once the raptor is lured into the trapping station, they are entangled by a series of nets and spring loaded traps.

Extracting a Cooper's Hawk.

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Each bird is measured, weighed, and equipped with a metal leg band displaying a unique ID number. If recaptured or sighted elsewhere, this ID number can be tell us a lot about the annual movements of each species.