This is a posting that only an ardent birder could enjoy: the apparent sighting of a Harlan’s Hawk near Wynndel. (That this bird was a Harlan’s has now been confirmed by Brian Wheeler who examined six of the pictures taken of it.)
The day was sunny, so Derek Kite and I took our cameras for a Sunday drive around the Creston flats. This is the region at the south end of Kootenay Lake that, prior to the dykes, would seasonally become part of the Lake. It is now largely open agricultural land. The crops attract rodents, and these in turn, attract coyotes and raptors, so it is a good place to see hawks. Quite a few Red-tailed Hawks were seen on the drive and I attach the best shot of one in flight (taken by Derek).
Rick Howie assesses the pictures: We can rule out Rough-legged hawk quickly due to the lack of a prominent belly band. It would be much darker and more extensive on all but perhaps light male adult Roughies. I think we can all agree that this is a juvenile bird based upon the white patches on the folded wing and showing on the back of the flying bird, the strongly-banded tail with no rufous showing, the heavily-barred underwings and pale iris. I think the white throat rules out various morphs of the typical western B.j. calurus form. The darker black-brown tints and white throat suggest B.j. harlani to me. The broad white supercilium also fits the intermediate morph of harlani. So my thinking at the moment is juvenile Harlan’s Hawk in some sort of intermediate morph plumage.
Among the various red-tails, there was one seen just south of the community of Wynndel that had the right body plan, but a somewhat odd plumage. Yet, it was beyond my skills to know what it was. A knowledgeable birder, Rick Howie, suggested that the pictures show a Harlan’s Hawk.
The Harlan’s is (by most accounts) a subspecies of the Red-tailed Hawk, but it breeds far north of here and generally winters far south. The only time one would usually expect to see a Harlan’s in this area is during migration. While there have been scattered reports of Harlan’s wintering elsewhere in the BC interior, none had been known to winter around here.
First, Derek’s spectacular picture of a characteristic local Red-tailed Hawk with its buff colouring.
Then, the two pictures of the Harlan’s Hawk, first in a tree,
and then in flight.
Feel free to weigh in on the identification.
Thunk!
prime bird killer
A Varied Thrush just died on impact with a window in my home—not a happy event. It is embarrassing to realize that a couple of birds are killed by my home in this way each year. Multiplied by many buildings, this adds up to a substantial toll. It is estimated at about 22 million in Canada each year—likely mainly in urban areas.
Yet, windows are passive killers, they don’t actively roam the countryside searching out birds to kill. For that anthropomorphic source of avian death, one must turn to an invasive species: the domestic cat.
For a long time it was thought that windows were a greater threat to birds than cats, but a new study by the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute now places the annual number of bird kills by cats in the U.S. in the billions. Indeed, an earlier National Geographic study that attached tiny video cameras to household cats to monitor their activities, found that a substantial part of a cat’s outdoor time was spent hunting, with an average success rate of over two kills a week per cat. Yikes.
I don’t own a pet cat—a coyote made sure of that. Granted that best estimates now place windows as a far smaller threat to birds than are cats, that realization is thin gruel when one hears that disconcerting THUNK.
Moments earlier, this Varied Thrush flew free.
