Dark morph Harlan's Hawk?

-
I found this jet black hawk near Rocky Ford, Colorado yesterday while I was doing some surveys for the Great Backyard Bird Count in poorly covered areas. It has almost all the field marks for a dark morph Harlan's Red-tailed Hawk as identified by Brian Wheeler in Raptors of Western North America. It does have a black head, dark brown iris, black underparts including black undertail coverts, black wings.
It is a jet black bird but it has some white feathers on it's nape or possibly white underfeathers as these were visible when the wind blew it's feathers up. It also has whitish lores. I did not get any photos, nor was I able to view, it's backside to get a view of the upperparts or if the wings were shorter than the tail. Tail is not clearly viewed but it appears to be banded and it clearly has wide terminal black band. I did not do any tweaking/editing on these photos. SeEtta

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spotted Sandpiper Chicks, 3 more days older

-
Image
Two days when I went to check on the Spotted Sandpiper family at Florence River Park I thought they had likely perished--there were two men engaged in gold panning right where the parent sandpiper had been and they had dug some of the sand from the bank where I last saw the sandpiper chicks. Arggh, I was afraid that all this activity, plus a large off leash dog with these people, would have scared the parent away and even if the chicks were successful in hiding in the vegetation they would not survive without a parent at their young age. What a surprise when I returned that evening for one last check to be accosted by the parent sandpiper calling loudly and challenging me by walking right towards me (and my dog). It took awhile for the parent to settle down and for one of the chicks to walk in some grass where I could spot it--the parent had moved the chicks about 150 from the river into an area with a lot of vegetation. I returned day before yesterday and refound the parent and
Read more

Recently fledged Common Raven

-
Image
At the end of March this year I spotted a Common Raven going into a crevice above a rock face of a local cliff area called Castle Rock (as part of it looks sort of like a castle). I started watching this area and observed a pair of Common Ravens spending time around this location. On March 27 I spotted one of the ravens inside the crevice which now had what looked like nesting material in it--the photograph of that is the second pic here. I continued off and on to check this apparent crevice nest. At the end of May I saw what appeared to be a nestling inside the crevice. I continued birding in the riparian forest across the Arkansas River from this cliff area. When I was about a quarter mile away I heard a lot of raven racket and walked to a spot where I could see the cliff area through my binoculars. I could see a lot of raven action with the parent birds calling loudly so I expected that the nestling may have fledged or they were trying to get it to fledge. I went back t
Read more