[Photo taken by Rod Olsen & friends] |
One of Rod Olsen's students [a slight fellow] holds a small adult Redtail. In addition to the bird's size, birds at the gray end of the plumage spectrum don't have the blackish brown backs of so many northern Redtails here in the east in Winter. I just posted a gray-backed Roughleg image.
While they are hooded [dark headed, sometimes with golden hackles], when they are grayish you can see this in flight as silvery flecking on the back. |
 |
This bird fits the textbook description for a juvenile Western Red-tailed Hawk:. It is not. Many birds like this move through our area. Some are darker than others, especially with the very wide, nearly solid belly band.
At a distance the large amount of near solid right down to the lower belly makes it look like a Roughleg. |
 |
Okay, so it is badly out of focus from the distance and the low light on an overcast day. In addition to the dark head and overall orangey wash on the breast above the belly band, there is a halo of darker reddish-orange... see it?
This is pretty much undescribed for Redtails! If it were, it would be for some western variety. But I took this digiscope image in Vermont on 12/22/02. |
 |
What is the well-dressed Redtail wearing this Winter? On Christmas Eve '02 on Pt. Peninsula NY, this adult bird was perched on a wire. The left wrist has what has been identified as "clingy vet wrap" remaining after an injury and rehabilitation... somewhere.
Overall brownish markings -- front and back -- are less common, but the dark brown backed birds, contrasting with a different front, in the east in Winter is more the rule. There's a nearly identical bird -- brown on brown --pictured on the next page and seen a couple hundred miles east of this one a few days later. Wings fall short of the end of the tail. |