Nine-year-old Joseph Bettios was watching TV one day in early April when he looked out the window and saw something looking back in at him.
He lives with his family on the fourth floor of an Avenue C apartment building near 32nd Street. There was no fire escape near this particular window, but he heard a scratching noise coming from the window – the scraping of a bird’s talons on the air conditioner.
“At first, I thought it was an owl,” he said during a brief interview. “When we looked it up, we found out that it was a hawk.”
The hawk stared at Joseph, and Joseph, in return, stared at the hawk.
“I called my father and he took pictures,” Joseph said.
“At first, I thought it was an owl.” -- Joseph Bet
The red tail hawk took off a short time later, only to come back.
Again, Joseph, and his two brothers, Christopher and Peter, heard the scraping on the air conditioner.
The hawk stayed around for a long time, too, leaving once more only to return.
“He stayed there about an hour and a half,” Joseph said.
Red tail hawks are not uncommon, according to Bayonne Bird Photographer Marvin Silber, who helped the Community News identify a red tail hawk that had perched in the Bergen Point section of the city a few years ago.
Silber, who had photographed birds throughout the area for decades, said he had seen hawks feeding previously in Stephen Gregg County Park.
Red tailed hawks, he said, sometimes feed along the eastern side of Bayonne, where rodents and other small wildlife make for easy prey.
Silber, an avid photographer of birds, has displayed and published his pictures for years, and has given lectures on birds in the area at the local library. A semi-retired window display person, he frequently visits nature areas throughout the state on his way to and from jobs.
Over the years, he has amassed more than 100,000 slides and an estimated 20,000 prints in his collection.
He has also conducted studies of local bird populations – including birds in Stephen Gregg Park – and he is currently collecting information on the number of species that can be found at the former Military Ocean Terminal site.
Some of the birds he's seen at the MOBTY include a green heron, a blue heron, a black belly plover, a yellow legs, a great egret, a cormorant, and an immature black crown heron - which is on the endangered list in New Jersey. During an interview this week, he recalled seeing a great egret in Stephen Gregg Park when he first started. He knew nothing about birds then, but had taken pictures while overseas.
Joseph said he had never seen a hawk so close up before.
“I’ve seen them flying,” he said. “But not like this.”
Best guess is that the hawk may have been seeking a location for a potential nest.
Joseph, who attends third grade at Dr. W.F. Robinson School in Bayonne, brought the pictures to school as part of a demonstration.
“The other kids were amazed,” he said.
Hudson Reporter
