Slow Week
Title is pretty intuitive of what happened in the past week, it was an incredibly slow week for the project. We only acquired ten observations, a record low number. Not a great number for my expectations, though I didn't help much in the past week either. Don't expect much more help from me in the next week either since I'm going to the coast.
Today's observation of the week will go to @masonmaron for a photo of a rufous morph Western Red-tailed Hawk. While I have the opportunity, I'm going to take it. One thing I've stressed on in this project is the presence of vagrant Red-tailed Hawk subspecies showing up in eastern WA/OR. Since I moved into the area four years ago, I tagged over a dozen or so hawks that don't quite fall under the expected traits of the breeding subspecies. One of the things we learned only a couple years ago about the subspecies abieticola is, the existence of dark morphs. This was determined when eastern US got dark morphs in the winter. All of these sightings were identified as the Western race at the time but experts starting noting there weren't proportionally the same amount of light morph Westerns in the area, in fact none at all. This suggested the migrants belonged to a forgotten and currently unrecognized race. In response to this discovery, ebird created the slash calurus/abieticola to document dark morphs in the midwest and eastern US.
Question is, how many of our own dark morphs, especially in the winter, are truly dark morph Westerns? As of know, there's no definitive identification marks to separate dark morphs from the two subspecies. However, I looked at dozens of photos of proposed dark morph abieticola and I noticed that these individuals tended to have colder brown tones, a broad subterminal band and oftentimes funky tail patterns as a result of intergradation with Harlan's. Mason's bird does not exhibit any of these features so I think we can identify with certainty that it's a Western. But it's good to keep your eye out for these oddities. I would also recommend looking at the ebird top rated photos for the subspecies slash because there you'll see what I mean by funky tail patterns. Links below.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/62171791
Let's break 500 observations this following week, it's only a mean 13 observations away. I wish you the best of luck hawkwatchers!
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