Birds and Nature

This is the 2nd Harlan's Hawk I photographed Sunday near Rocky Ford, Colorado. It is an intermediate morph with white on it's forehead (overlapping supercilium) and throat, white streaking on it's 'hindneck', dark crown, white streaks on breast and some white speckling on belly. The wings just shorter than tail when perched upright as shown in middle pic. The bottom pic is interesting as it shows a lot of white feathers that, similar to the apparent dark morph in the previous post, appear to be 'underfeathers' that are visible when the wind blows the top feathers up. I still haven't found any documentation on that. SeEtta iv>

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