[va-bird] Rough-legged Hawks

[Icepeep@xxxxxxx]

Hi List,
       With all of the reports of Rough-legged Hawks coming in I think it 
would be wise to heed the words of some of the foremost authorities on hawks in 
the world. It may be nice to put a label on every bird we see as to age and sex 
but there is no way to tell the sex of immature Rough-legged Hawks except in 
the hand. Even second year birds are a problem and all of the pages and pages 
available to us in the many recently published tomes on the subject can't 
quite clarify those birds to make conclusive ID's a lock. Like trying to tell 
if a 
bird is a Cooper's Hawk or a Sharpie, there is enough variation on these 
common raptors that we see all the time to still leave many birds as sp. on our 
daily lists. The underwing coverts on second year Rough-legged Hawks are 
supposed to be quite pale and thinly marked on females and boldly patterned on 
males. 
Several of the sub-adult birds I saw in Loudoun County this weekend had 
medium amounts of marking in this area of the wing, leaving me convinced that 
there 
was no black or white when it came to sexing them. How far this variable 
field mark leans in one direction or the other is unknown to me despite all of 
my 
reading and interrogating. Dick Forsman states in his Raptors of Europe and 
The Middle East that some second year birds cannot be separated from adults. 
Some immature birds look like intermediate plumaged birds but are in fact not. 
And on and on it goes. He simply ends the text on Rough-legged Hawks with the 
statement, "Adult males and females differ in plumage, but juveniles and most 
first-adults cannot be reliably sexed by plumage characters." 
       As we were taught back home in ice hockey from the first day we got on 
skates, "Keep your heads up or you'll be on your tails."
Bob Abrams 
McLean, Virginia 


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