Hawk ID?

[Carma Sue Henry]

This hawk (first 3 photos) has been coming in recently.  It's giving us some confusion.  It looks like a Red-tailed Hawk, with it's heavily barred tail, but it doesn't seem to have the any actual red coloring.  You can see the underside of the tail where it's grooming and it really just white as is the chest.  Is lack of the red coloring possibly a juvenile feature?  Are there light morphs?

The only other option I've found, with so many bars on the tail, is a Peregrin Falcon.  The tree that it's on is above a couple of small mowed fields, but near a lot of dense oak/fir woods.  I think of Peregrins as frequenting much more open areas.  And I don't see the dark facial patches that a Peregrin should have.

We get very few Brewer's and Red-winged Blackbirds during the summer.  Yesterday the a couple of Brewer's showed up back (the full front facial look of the one in back is very funny-looking), joined today by a young Red-winged male.  Fall is on the way!

Carma Henry

[olin...@earthlink.net]

It’s a classic juvenile western red-tail, with the light breast, broken “band” across the belly, and the barred tail.  In banders’ terms this is a hatch year bird, meaning it hatched earlier this year.  It won’t molt into its red tail until next year.  There are a bewildering variety of light and dark morphs in red-tails.  Most references would call this a light morph, which is actually the typical plumage.  Darker morphs are uncommon.

 

Olin

------------

Olin Allen

olin...@earthlink.net

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Mid-Valley Nature" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mid-valley-nat...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mid-valley-nature/68c4ebcf.170a0220.19f5c9.afe8SMTPIN_ADDED_MISSING%40gmr-mx.google.com.