This Teen Photographer Captured a Raptor Rarity: Bald Eagles Raising a Red-tailed Hawk Chick

Parham Pourahmad is always on the lookout for fascinating wildlife behavior to photograph. So, when he got wind of a Red-tailed Hawk fledgling that ended up in a Bald Eagle nest 45 minutes from his California home, he knew it was a moment he had to capture.

The only problem? At 13 years old, Parham would need a little help getting there.

Fortunately, his parents were happy to help, just as they have since Parham, now 14, first fell in love with photography in the early days of the pandemic. Seeking solace from lockdown, he began spending time at a local park, where a nesting pair of Red-shouldered Hawks caught his attention. His interest widened from there. “I started taking pictures of the other birds and wildlife, too,” Parham says. “After the pandemic, I started going to parks a bit further out with even cooler wildlife.”

His obsession with photography grew—and so did his list of accolades. This summer his photo of mating American Kestrels won the Youth prize in the 2024 Audubon Photography Awards. Two of his other submissions also ranked in the overall Top 100 photos. Parham started high school this August.

The teenager’s goal for his photos? To capture something “really, really cool.” Those fleeting moments come around “maybe a couple times a year,” he says—A Western Grebe pair’s mating dance or a cute and playful red fox pup—but you wouldn’t know it from his expertly curated Instagram account, which he regularly updates with his stunning work.

It was while surfing Facebook that Parham came across the Red-tailed Hawk taken in by Bald Eagles. The original photographer didn’t post the nest’s whereabouts, but Parham immediately recognized the location:  Joseph D. Grant County Park, just outside San Jose.  Predatory birds were already among his favorite subjects, so he knew that if he could photograph two raptor species at once—with an unusual behavior to boot—it was too good to pass up.

A young hawk growing up in an eagle nest is not without precedent, but it is rare, according Rob Bierregaard, president of the nonprofit Raptor Research Foundation. Mixed species adoptions have probably always happened occasionally, but only recently have photographers been fortunate enough to document them, as they have twice each in British Columbia and California over the last decade.  Whether these examples suggest an uptick in the behavior—possibly connected to the widespread resurgence of Bald Eagles—is unclear, experts say.

The harsh reality, though, is that these interactions are far from cuddly. The eagles Parham photographed no doubt brought the Red-tail to their nest intending not to raise it, but to feed it to their own nestling. However, when it was deposited into the aerie, the hungry and disoriented fledgling immediately began begging for food alongside the eaglets. The confused parent eagles mistook the hawk as one of their own and began treating it in kind. Though surprising, such behavior can occur when the wrong species ends up in a nest. That’s because most adult birds cannot recognize their own chicks from others—a vulnerability that brood parasites exploit by laying eggs in other species’ nests.

Determined to photograph this novel scenario, Parham set out with his Nikon D3500 and a Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary lens. “I mostly just wanted to have one high-quality picture to show the behavior that was happening,” he says. His first trip was a wash, with the young hawk hunkered down in the nest, which was cloaked by persistent fog. Undeterred, Parham soon returned on a sunny afternoon and found the hawk and its adopted sibling exploring the branches around the nest. To truly capture the moment, he hoped to depict the hawk with one of its “parents.” After carefully sneaking as close he could without disturbing the birds, he got his chance, freezing the young hawk in time as it cried to the stern-looking eagles. 

Sadly, the fledgling didn’t survive much longer. A few weeks after Parham took the photos, the eagles stopped feeding the bird and it succumbed to starvation, the same fate met by other young hawks in eagle nests. Still, capturing these moments provided the public with a window into the beauty and the complexities of avian life. As Parham himself might put it, that’s really, really cool.