MONROE, Conn. — A local woman was heading north on Monroe Turnpike in her white Volkswagen Atlas Tuesday morning, when a red-shouldered hawk came into view, swooping down in an apparent effort to capture prey. She swerved to her left to avoid the bird, when it suddenly changed direction and she hit it head on.
“She didn’t see the bird and had no idea where it was,” said Monroe Animal Control Officer Gina Gambino.
Concerned about the animal, Gambino said the woman pulled into the Edith Wheeler Memorial Library parking lot and found the hawk, wedged in the SUV’s grille, but still alive.
She went to the Monroe Police Department for help and a dispatcher called Gambino to the scene.
“I got all of my resources together and headed up there,” Gambino said, adding one officer thought the hawk was a turkey.
Gambino said red-shouldered hawks are most often mistaken for red-tailed hawks, which are larger, and Cooper hawks.
“The grille was cracked in front of the vehicle,” she recalled. “I was able to get the leg out of the grille, one of the legs was wedged in there, that’s how the bird was hanging on, by one leg.”
To provide herself with some protection, Gambino said she wore calf skin gloves to allow for the needed dexterity.
After the rescue, she drove the hawk to Christine’s Critters in Weston. “It’s in the best place to recover,” Gambino said of the rehab facility. “The bird has multiple injuries. They’re not sure it’s going to make it. It has an injury to its beak and an eye, but its legs look okay. I would say it has a 50-50 shot, as birds can be quite delicate.”
“This is very much an occurrence of what we do here at Animal Control,” Gambino said of birds being struck by vehicles.
On Nov. 24, a barred owl, pictured here from a Facebook post, was struck by a car in the 500-block of Cutlers Farm Road. Gambino brought the bird to Christine’s Critters the next day to treat an injury to its eye.
“Over the next few days they cared for it and, once again, it was eating mice,” she said, adding the owl is ready for release back into the wild this Thursday.
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