Merry Christmas! Mark French and I hit 9 stops in the Black Dirt Region (one in NJ, eight in NY) on Saturday. Numbers were low overall and we didn't wait out the owls because of the wind. Short-eareds often wait until near full darkness, before emerging on windy evenings. We tallied 13 NORTHERN HARRIERS (low), 8 ROUGH-LEGGED HAWKS (very low - six light, one dark, one intermediate morph), 5 AMERICAN KESTRELS (four males, one female), 2 LAPLAND LONGSPURS (Skinner's), & 19 WHITE-CROWNED SPARROWS (one large flock with one adult and eighteen first-winters).
A separate note for some interesting RED-TAILED HAWKS. A completely dark bird and I mean completely, except for a "red tail" was seen on Skinner's. We had two other interesting Red-tails, at an area a mile or more away. One appeared to be a classic abieticola. A second bird was very dark overall and only appeared to have a sliver of light coloring extending down the middle of the breast. Unfortunately this bird spent most of its time ground-hunting. When it did make a short flight, we only got a rear-view, confirming that it was a RTHA but we did not get a better look at the front of the bird. Could this be an offspring of the all dark bird that is resident around Skinner's? Mike Britt Bayonne, NJ -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
