Winter's Bite
What has the first eleven days of November gave us? Bitter cold, or at least that's what I'm told since I'm an very tolerate of colder weather. Northeastern Oregon got two inches of snow Saturday and since it's been snowing as fast as its melting. Roads are a complete mess but that didn't stop me from hopping into the car and getting out in the valley looking for hawks. We added 33 observations to the project over the week, though admittingly, I posted 24 of those. I got my first Rough-legged Hawk of the 2020-2021 winter which is big for me.
The observation of the week is another Red-tailed Hawk of the western race. This excellent flight shot from @danithedeer in Madras shows a rufous morph. I won't go into the whole speech again on identifying this cool guys but you might like this. I found two northern-type Red-tails two days ago in the Grande Ronde Valley. They were juveniles so much harder to identify to subspecies, if at all. The jury is still out in confidently confirming my hawks as abieticola because calurus can exhibit my key field marks, but these variants do not occur in juveniles born and raised in Oregon, so my hypothesis is that they come from British Columbia or Alberta. Anyway, you can see the rufous Western Red-tailed here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/64401965
In the following week, stay safe as roads are becoming more hazardous. Snow is not fun to drive in if you don't know what you're doing. But if you get a chance, photograph some raptors and see what kind of data can be produced. Good luck!
תגובות
הוספת תגובה