[obol] Sauvie Island Hawks
- From: Philip Kline <pgkline_uk@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Oregon Listserve <obol@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2013 15:58:49 -0800 (PST)
I spent a couple of hours this morning driving around the southern half of
Sauvie Island looking for Rough-legged Hawks and enjoying the snowy scenery. I
came up empty, but found three interesting red-tails in the Reeder Road Dike
area (aka Coon Point). The first was an adult Harlan's that I initially
mistook as a Rough-legged. It was perched and partially obscured, but as I got
closer I noticed it had a dark head and the whitish streaky area in front was
confined to the upper chest. It was all dark otherwise. When it took off, I
could see it's two-toned wings and upper tail quite clearly, which had broad
white vertical streaks with narrower, diffuse, darker streaks mixed in ending
in a dark terminal band. An adult intermediate (possibly rufous) morph red-tail
was fairly close by, but more distant. I could see it's red tail clearly in
flight. Finally, perched on a phone pole a couple hundred yards to the south
was an immature
intermediate/dark morph that had me confused for a while before I figured out
what it was. This bird was mostly dark brown, but heavily mottled with lighter
spots all over. I thought at first that it might be an immature
Red-shouldered, but it had a yellow eye and the tail pattern was more typical
of immature red-tailed (horizontal dark bars numerous and narrow). Other than
that, it was harriers, kestrels, and Bald Eagles, with a nice perched Peregrine
and adult Cooper's Hawk mixed in. A single Greater Scaup was on the Multnomah
Channel (it spread its wings) with a Ruddy Duck and a handful of Common
Mergansers. A Red-tailed Hawk flushed a snipe from the edge of a cornfield
along Oak Island Road.
Good birding,
Philip Kline
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