Cornell Protects Big Red, Star of Red-tailed Hawk Cam, During Construction

From the Spring 2026 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

While Doug Sheerer was overseeing construction on Cornell University’s Meinig Fieldhouse during the spring of 2025, he had a constant, feathery companion.

Nearly every day from March to August, Sheerer watched a Red-tailed Hawk named Big Red—who has nested on campus for more than a decade—flutter through the site, weaving between rising steel beams.

“She’s quite a bird,” says Sheerer, the project superintendent. “Quite a bird.”

Before construction crews broke ground on the new fieldhouse in October 2024, there were concerns about whether Big Red would return to her longtime breeding area to nest atop a light pole overlooking a former complex of athletic fields in the heart of the Cornell campus. Since 2012, her nest has been live-streamed and watched by millions through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bird Cams project.

Scientists at the Cornell Lab were worried construction would scare off Big Red. But before construction began, Cornell’s facilities staff, the construction team, and the Cornell Lab worked together to come up with a plan to protect the nest site and incorporate bird-safe windows in the new building.

“[This project] was all about trying to be progressive and build infrastructure and work around nature at the same time,” Sheerer says. “It can be done if you just pay attention to what you’re doing.”

Construction manager Jake Duell says when planning began, the 12 aging light poles surrounding the athletic fields were slated to come down. But two of them had held Big Red’s nest in past years, and Cornell’s Facilities Department, following advice from the Cornell Lab, wanted to give the hawk a chance to stay where she always has. So the demolition crew left those two light poles standing, “in hopes that the hawks would come back and nest in them,” Duell says. “It was really just a shot in the dark that they would come back.”

His crew also worked with the Cornell Lab to keep the webcam running, installing new power and data transmission lines at the remaining poles so it would be ready to catch the action if Big Red did indeed return.

On March 5, 2025, the Red-tailed Hawk cam came back online for its 14th season, and viewers watched Big Red and her mate, Arthur, rearrange the twigs left from 2024 on a remaining light pole, shaping the pile into a bowl. Before long, viewers saw the nest gain one brown-speckled egg, then another, and finally a third. Cam viewers followed along as Big Red and Arthur raised their fledglings, seemingly unfazed by the new building rising on their territory.

“It worked out perfect,” Duell says. He says his work crew embraced the hawks as part of daily life, even sporting stickers of Big Red (gifts made by one of the hawk cam fans) on their hard hats. On the hottest days, the construction crew filled water jugs and fashioned a makeshift birdbath. 

“It’s funny,” Duell says, “because they are the most hardened guys that I’ve known forever, and they’re so soft when it comes to these birds.”

Charles Eldermire, the project leader for the Cornell Lab’s Bird Cams, says he’s noticed that Big Red, her mates, and her fledglings seem somewhat unperturbable, so he’s not surprised the redtails came back and nested again. Still, he says, seeing Big Red return last spring was a relief. The webcam, which draws a small amount of electricity from the poles, connects millions of viewers to Big Red and her world. Without those poles, Eldermire says, that window into the hawks’ lives would have gone dark.

“Giving a chance for nature to still thrive—for it to be resilient, to plan for at least a chance for it to happen—can result in something beautiful,” Eldermire says.

The fieldhouse construction also planned to install glass etched with dots spaced two inches apart to ensure the hawks would not collide with the new building. Collisions have been a danger on campus to Big Red’s fledglings and her former mate; 13 of the 41 redtails observed on the cam have been injured or killed due to collisions with buildings or structures.

The bird-friendly fieldhouse construction is just the latest in a number of bird-safety projects that have improved the campus environment for hawks and other birds. Inspired by the hawks, a group of Cornell staff, alumni, students, and volunteers recently created Bird-Friendly Cornell, a group that led the effort to retrofit windows and promote bird-friendly designs for new structures.

Central to that effort have been Cynthia and Karel Sedlacek, who have been described by Cornell hawks fans as the birds’ guardian angels. The pair tracks the hawks in real life and alerts campus officials when the birds face challenges or have been injured (see Inspired by Big Red, below). Buildings such as the Cornell Lab’s Imogene Powers Johnson Center at Sapsucker Woods—as well as Stocking Hall, Atkinson Hall, and bus shelters on campus—now feature protective measures (such as window cords or fritted glass) that reduce the risk of bird collisions.

Eldermire says he’s grateful that if the Red-tailed Hawks come back again this spring, they’ll be coming to a campus that’s safer for nesting and raising young. Big Red turns 23 years old in 2026, he says—quite impressive given that wild Red-tailed Hawks typically live 10 to 15 years.

“Each of these years that we have left [with Big Red],” he says, “you can’t take for granted.”