A Virginia Hawk Was Found Grounded in a Driveway. Vets Say She Was Too Fat to Fly.

ROANOKE, Va., Nov. 3, 2026 — When a resident near Roanoke found an adult red-shouldered hawk sitting in her driveway, unable to get airborne, she assumed the bird was hurt. The Southwest Virginia Wildlife Center, about a mile away, assumed the same thing. They were both wrong.

Veterinarians ran through the usual list, the center said. They checked for broken bones, lead poisoning, eye problems, head trauma, starvation and bruising from a collision or a fight. Everything came back normal. What they did find was a layer of fat so thick that "we couldn't even palpate her keel," the breastbone vets feel to judge a bird's condition, the center wrote, as UPI reported. The diagnosis: she was "too darn fat to fly."

She weighed about 2 pounds, close to a full pound over normal for a female of her species. Wild animals rarely get that heavy on their own, so the staff started asking questions. Was she a lost falconry bird? Had someone been feeding her? Was she an escaped captive? None of it fit, according to KTLA.

Then the woman who found her did some asking around and called back a couple of weeks later with the answer. A neighbor's free-roaming chickens "were disappearing at an alarming rate over the last few weeks."

"This queen was picking off the buffet of easy prey set out before her, eating her fill, and then snoozing in the trees nearby until she was ready to eat again," the center wrote. "The chickens were let out in the morning, she ate another, and repeat."

The hawk, logged as RSHA 26-2599, is now on a weight-loss diet. The center said the funny part comes with a serious one: a hawk that can't fly is easy prey itself, and this could have ended badly if something bigger had found her first. Its advice to anyone keeping chickens is to cover the run.