Decided it was “Take Your Camera to Work” day, cause those sensors need some love every now and then. Luckily it snowed last night and this glorious sunrise started to appear while taking the long way to work.
A section of the foremast of HMS Victory with a cannonball shot through it, which had happened during the Battle of Trafalgar. Here, this section is currently being palziert in the National Museum of the Royal Navy and has been available for public viewing since March of this year.
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road– Only wakes upon the sea.
It was pretty cold this afternoon when I went birdwatching. I was out for the last 90 minutes of sunlight, and I saw a few things that made me happy, including a small flock of cedar waxwings, some bushtits in the bushes, and a Bewick’s wren at a feeder.
I also saw a hawk I couldn’t identify. It was perched pretty high up in what looked like a redwood, and I saw it getting harassed a bit by a couple of crows, but not so much that it left. I watched it for quite a while, including walking around the corner and up the street to see it from another angle. I thought perhaps it was immature, but which kind of hawk? The back was brown with some white speckling, and the tail was brown, with some faintish darker brown stripes. From the front, the chest was a lighter brown with white speckling; whiter at the throat, and possibly more orangey closer to the tail. The underside of the tail itself was white, with faint stripes. The eyes and feet were yellow, but the beak looked possibly more grey. @lies, any thoughts?
(Annoyingly, eBird seems to have erased my notes on this bird, perhaps because I had not identified it but just put “hawk sp.”–but that’s especially irritating because the notes were intended to help me identify it later! But luckily I watched the bird for long enough to remember many details of its appearance.)
Hawks are interesting for a lot of reasons. But one of those reasons is that distinctive plumage patterns can be less useful for identifying hawks than they are for other types of birds.
Hawks tend to have the same basic plumage patterns across many species. They’re brownish and speckled, darker on top and lighter below. I think that’s probably a camouflage thing. So that’s one thing that makes it hard to use plumage patterns as a guide to hawk identification — there’s an alllooksame thing going on.
But it gets worse. Within one hawk species there can be a wide range of individual variation, dark morphs and light morphs that are the same species, but look completely different in terms of plumage pattern.
I don’t mean to imply that plumage patterns aren’t important for hawk ID. They are important. But they’re not the best starting point. They’re more something you want to go to for confirmation, after you’ve done the heavy lifting with some other distinguishing characteristics.
Like what, you ask?
Structure. And if you’re lucky enough to see the bird in flight, flight style.
Different groups of hawks have evolved different hunting strategies, and this manifests in different overall shape and structure. Accipiters have long tails and (relatively) short wings so they can outmaneuver their bird prey as they chase it through foliage. They accelerate quickly. They flap rapidly and glide, flap and glide.
Buteos have broad wings and short broad tails so they can soar efficiently, covering lots of area with minimal effort, using their amazing vision to spot prey far away, then diving on it. They flap their wings more slowly than accipiters. They’ve got relatively bulky bodies.
Falcons have a totally different shape, with long pointed wings, long tails, and big heads, which gives their body a built-for-speed teardrop shape.
As you get more familiar with the basic silhouette birds of prey you’ll get to where you can narrow things down really quickly just from the bird’s overall shape (and flight style, if you get to see that). Then if you know the status snd distribution of the birds of prey that live in your area, you’re looking at discriminating between 2 or 3 species at most, rather than the 10 or 20 you might need to sift through if all you recognize is that it’s a bird of prey.
From what you describe my guess would be Red-tailed Hawk. They’re pretty much the “default buteo”. Assume any big bulky hawk is a redtail until proven otherwise. :-)
Yeah, I noticed that there was a lot of variation in the plumage in the photos in Merlin for each species, and none of the pictures seemed to look quite like the bird I saw. I did think the tail looked shortish, but since the bird didn’t seem to be in the mood to go anywhere, and I was getting cold, I never got to see it fly. It was a pretty bulky bird! I hesitated to say “red-tailed hawk” because the tail just didn’t look red. I left it unidentified on my checklist. My theory is that both red-tailed hawk and red-shouldered hawk were possible. Both are hawks I’ve seen around here, though of course red-tailed is more common.
Immature Red-tailed Hawks don’t have their red tails yet, so that’s not the most helpful characteristic. If it’s there, then bingo, Red-tailed Hawk, but if it’s missing you have to look further.
A couple of things you can look for on perched birds is that light-morph Red-tails often have a very light breast with a dark belly band below it, and on their back they often have a speckling of lighter feathers in the shape of a large “V” with the point downward.
Red-shouldered Hawks have somewhat different features you can look for. Their pattern below tends to be the reverse of Red-tails: with Red-shouldered the markings tend to be heaviest on the breast and somewhat lighter on the belly. They also tend to have a high-contrast pattern of biggish light and dark marks on the folded wings, and a very dark tail with narrow white bands. And if you can see the bird well, the red “shoulders” are a good clincher.
I don’t know if you’d consider investing in a small “super-zoom” camera, but they’ve become really popular in recent years with birders. There’s a newer generation of birders, especially, who (somewhat scandalously, from the perspective of old-school types) don’t even bother trying to ID birds in the field. Instead they focus on getting photos, then they study the photos after the fact. If you post the photos to eBird it means more experienced birders can weigh in on the ID, and it also creates a valuable scientific record.
It was pretty cold this afternoon when I went birdwatching. I was out for the last 90 minutes of sunlight, and I saw a few things that made me happy, including a small flock of cedar waxwings, some bushtits in the bushes, and a Bewick’s wren at a feeder.
I also saw a hawk I couldn’t identify. It was perched pretty high up in what looked like a redwood, and I saw it getting harassed a bit by a couple of crows, but not so much that it left. I watched it for quite a while, including walking around the corner and up the street to see it from another angle. I thought perhaps it was immature, but which kind of hawk? The back was brown with some white speckling, and the tail was brown, with some faintish darker brown stripes. From the front, the chest was a lighter brown with white speckling; whiter at the throat, and possibly more orangey closer to the tail. The underside of the tail itself was white, with faint stripes. The eyes and feet were yellow, but the beak looked possibly more grey. @lies, any thoughts?
(Annoyingly, eBird seems to have erased my notes on this bird, perhaps because I had not identified it but just put “hawk sp.”–but that’s especially irritating because the notes were intended to help me identify it later! But luckily I watched the bird for long enough to remember many details of its appearance.)
Hawks are interesting for a lot of reasons. But one of those reasons is that distinctive plumage patterns can be less useful for identifying hawks than they are for other types of birds.
Hawks tend to have the same basic plumage patterns across many species. They’re brownish and speckled, darker on top and lighter below. I think that’s probably a camouflage thing. So that’s one thing that makes it hard to use plumage patterns as a guide to hawk identification — there’s an alllooksame thing going on.
But it gets worse. Within one hawk species there can be a wide range of individual variation, dark morphs and light morphs that are the same species, but look completely different in terms of plumage pattern.
I don’t mean to imply that plumage patterns aren’t important for hawk ID. They are important. But they’re not the best starting point. They’re more something you want to go to for confirmation, after you’ve done the heavy lifting with some other distinguishing characteristics.
Like what, you ask?
Structure. And if you’re lucky enough to see the bird in flight, flight style.
Different groups of hawks have evolved different hunting strategies, and this manifests in different overall shape and structure. Accipiters have long tails and (relatively) short wings so they can outmaneuver their bird prey as they chase it through foliage. They accelerate quickly. They flap rapidly and glide, flap and glide.
Buteos have broad wings and short broad tails so they can soar efficiently, covering lots of area with minimal effort, using their amazing vision to spot prey far away, then diving on it. They flap their wings more slowly than accipiters. They’ve got relatively bulky bodies.
Falcons have a totally different shape, with long pointed wings, long tails, and big heads, which gives their body a built-for-speed teardrop shape.
As you get more familiar with the basic silhouette birds of prey you’ll get to where you can narrow things down really quickly just from the bird’s overall shape (and flight style, if you get to see that). Then if you know the status snd distribution of the birds of prey that live in your area, you’re looking at discriminating between 2 or 3 species at most, rather than the 10 or 20 you might need to sift through if all you recognize is that it’s a bird of prey.
From what you describe my guess would be Red-tailed Hawk. They’re pretty much the “default buteo”. Assume any big bulky hawk is a redtail until proven otherwise. :-)
