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Friday, October 26, 2012
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
On the Wing
This is the hawk
of which I spoke in my previous post.
What a sight to see—150 to 200 hawks in a kettle! This is a favorite hawk for me, and only one
with which I’ve become familiar as an adult.
I can remember staring at Red Tailed Hawks making lazy circles over the
fields in the summers of my youth. However, this one became known to me later.
The Broad-winged Hawk is unusual in size and proportion. It doesn’t have the considerable size of some Red Tails and is not small as the American Kestrel. Yet, what catches my eye is the breadth of its wings and the banding of its tail. When you can find a hawk with alternating white and black stripes in equal amount on its tail, it’s a safe bet the hawk is a Broad-winged.
Photographs by Bill Ravenscroft.
Labels: bird watching, birding, Broad-winged hawks, Hawks, migration
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Birder's Best Buy Choice
Broad-winged Hawks and other raptors are flying
overhead even as we speak. Wilson Warblers and Kinglets are to be found
in the foliage. You don’t want to miss
the events of migration. For this,
there’s the birder’s best buy choice—the Vortex Viper HD binocular. Available in 8X
or 10
X.
Visit us at www.kingbirdfeeders.com for quality binoculars, spotting scopes, bird
feeders, bird houses, field guides, and gear.
Labels: bird watching, bird watching binocular, birding binoculars, Vortex Optics, Vortex Viper, Vortex Viper HD
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Orange You Glad
I know, it’s a
corny title for this post, but there it is.
And it’s all because of the orioles migrating through the region. This time it’s a Bullock’s Oriole.
It took me a
while to adjust to the splitting of the Northern Oriole into two different
species. Their field marks are
distinctive, though. There has been some
interbreeding between the Bullock and the Baltimore in the Great Plains. Fully breeding males of the two species are
easily recognized. Concentrating on the
head, the Baltimore is completely black while the Bullock has a lot of orange invading
the cheek and eye regions (actually a stripe of black through the eye adjacent
to an orange supercilium). Next, the
wing is barred in white for the Baltimore, but the Bullock’s wing has a large
distinctive white patch.
The difficulty
is in the immatures. The above
photographs are of a Bullock first year male.
The clues are the dark throat patch and the eye line.
Photographs by Bill Ravenscroft
Labels: Baltimore Oriole, birding, Bullock's Oriole, migration, Orioles