Educators registering at the site will receive a free poster. NWF also encourages communities to create suitable habitats for wildlife. The Community Wildlife Habitat program is an effort to create entire municipalities where people, flora and fauna can flourish. And though Cooper s hawks are doing well in Wisconsin, in Tucson 40 percent of their nestlings succumb to the disease trichomoniasis, which they get from the doves their parents feed them. And many of the remaining birds eventually die in collisions with windows, the major cause of mortality among adult Cooper s hawks in Tucson.
City streets pose other dangers for nesting raptors.
If there are fewer predatory owls, there are more dogs and feral cats. And young birds making their first flights must dodge traffic, says Jennifer Coulson, a graduate student at Tulane University. Another hazard for city raptors is the risk of electrocution when they perch on power poles. Finally, some birds die after eating pigeons that have been poisoned in the name of pest control. That s what killed one of New York s celebrity red-tails a few years ago.