Foggy Day, Fiddle Tune

Every once in a great while we go down to the river just to look for birds. We used to do that a lot. Now we seem to need an excuse, like having Corey here for a New Year's visit. But when we do, we find the birds were out there waiting for us, anyway.

Whipple Flats produced a young red-shouldered hawk. I know, it doesn't look identifiable, but there are obvious clues that might not immediately present themselves unless you've been seasoned by experience. The two species in contention for this buteo ID are red-shouldered and red-tailed. First, it's sitting on a power line, something most redtails are too large to do comfortably. The red-shoulder's small feet and short toes fit better than a redtail's on such a small-gauge perch. Second, those blobby, heavy streaks all down the front of its breast are typical of a young red-shoulder.  A redtail, even a young one, usually has a clear white or buff upper breast, with finer streaking across the middle of the belly. Third, it's got a small, fine bill. Fourth, the tail seems short and the bird overall compact and cobby. A redtail would look more elongated and much more massive. And it wouldn't be sitting on a wire! For those who are wondering, the call between broad-winged hawk and red-shouldered is much closer and more difficult to make. For the purposes of this ID, we are safe in assuming that all the broad-wings are in Costa Rica by January. Red-shoulders stick around, hence their folk name, "winter hawk."

We didn't have to give our second raptor of the day a second look, other than to ogle it. An adult bald eagle beats its way up the Muskingum. Fantastic. I love the impossibly long arms of the sycamore in the foreground. And I still can't take an eagle sighting for granted, no matter how much more frequent they are.

We got out to bird Devol's Dam, only to find it hopelessly fogged in. Waiting around didn't help. The rivers stayed foggy all day. 

Bad for birding, good for photography.

If Corey couldn't find any birds, there were no birds to be found.

I buy Phoebe's outerwear (Eddie Bauer) at the Eddie Bauer Warehouse in Columbus. The really nice stuff that winds up in the warehouse tends to be in wild colors. We're good with that.

I like imagining those colors against her hair when I'm holding up a prospective purchase. 

Corey and Phoebe are standing on the oldest existing hand-operated lock in the country. The system of locks that segment the Muskingum River are still operated by hand-cranking, and I've seen the guy come out and do it, when I've locked through in my Wee Lassie canoe. It's so cool to see a human being turn a crank to singlehandedly open the giant gate to drain the lock chamber. It's even cooler to be in a canoe and sink quickly down along the algae-slimed sides of the lock, or rise up as the water rushes in (if you're going upriver). 

Canada goose tracks in old mud below the lock.

Hey. Act like you're birding, even though the fog's too thick.

We walk across the Harmar railroad trestle to Marietta. Liam looks back to see if I'm still back there. Yes, slow as usual, drinking in the sight of you all.

I'm trying to capture the enormous old sycamore I love so well, that threatens to grow completely over the Marietta end of the trestle, and is succeeding.

Out at the confluence of the Muskingum and the mighty Ohio, a raft of Canada geese shelters one redhead duck, near the right end of the main flock.

Bill stops to read a sign next to an old engine, something my dad would have done. He's framed by crabapples.

I feel so lucky to spend time with these people, lucky that we all love watching birds on foggy days, walking around Front Street, and so many other things.

 

If they mind being followed around by their personal paparazzo, they haven't said anything. I think they like reliving these moments, too.

Seems like time for another fiddle tune from Corey and Bill. For your foot-stomping pleasure, here's "Coon Dog." I could listen to these fiddle tunes all day, or forever, while the cauliflower burns in the pan.

Sharp-shin Vs. Cooper's: Wrong Again, and Happily So

When we last left our heroine, she was flying through the air at a high rate of speed on her way to Orlando to give three talks and accompany (I won't say lead) two field trips in five days at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival in beautiful balmy Florida.

I left this...this...crapola... just this morning...

for this...

don't miss huuuuuge gator with nose on shore...

with my best boyfren Liam at Blue Springs State Park, Orange City, Florida. We watched the sun go down to the gentle exhalations of about a dozen of the 300 manatees parked there in the 72 degree crystal clear water. It is a wonderful world. You can fly two winter weary people to Paradise in just under three hours. 

Just as I went to turn my phone off just after noon today, a private Facebook message came in from none other than Kenn Kaufman, field guide author (birds, mammals, butterflies), writer and naturalist supreme. I'm taking the liberty of copying it here. After a friendly salutation, he wrote:

I looked at your blog post on Accipiters this morning, and just between us, I feel uneasy about the ID. I'm not an expert but I did spend a lot of time looking at plumage characters when I was working on Advanced Birding; I never saw a Sharp-shin, in a museum or in the field or in diagnostic photos, that had such a blackish cap. Just looking at the head in your photos - the blackish cap, pale nape, mauve-gray auriculars, and position of the eyes on the face - I would have been confident in calling it a Cooper's. I know about the leg shape difference and I've tried to illustrate it in the past, but to me the bird in your photos looks inconclusive in that regard.

I didn't want to start a public debate, but I thought it would be worthwhile to contact you privately about this. If the bird is indeed a Sharp-shinned, it totally alters my concept of head pattern on the species. At the very least, it would be far from typical, and it might be good to tell people that. But I'd encourage you to look at those characteristics of head and face pattern and reconsider this bird.

I think my favorite line is "I'm not an expert..."

Nah. You're not. Then, um, who is?? I chuckled and made a few quiet squees to myself, turned off my phone, and settled into my crappy airplane seat with a happy sigh. So it's a Cooper's after all. Well, dangit, my first thought was that it was a Cooper's, but then I talked myself into sharp-shin. Go with your first gut instinct...it's rarely wrong.

And when we landed and I turned my phone back on, there was another Facebook message from none other than Keith Bildstein, Sarkis Acopian Director of Conservation Science at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. Dude has seen and ID'd a few hundred thousand accipiters in his time. He wrote, 

Julie, looks like a Coops to me. White band prominent on rounded tail tip, but the relative closeness of the eye to the bill (versus the back of the head) is a dead giveaway. I hope this helps. In AZ now chasing TVs.

I. LOVE. IT. I'm leaving the original post just as it is, with a little addendum to point people to this one for, as Paul Harvey used to intone, "The Rest of the Story."  Because like paint thrown at a wall, the erroneous post has a beauty all its own. And for me, the beauty is that this is subtle stuff.  Even as I'm watching it down the last of its starling, this bird is morphing before my eyes. One moment it looks like a great big female sharpie; the next it looks like a small male Cooper's. One moment its bill looks delicate; the next a bit large for a sharp-shin. I just could not decide. And then I saw what looked like spindly legs, and I thought I had it nailed. Not so fast, Zickefoose.

photo by Diane Husic

I've been known to make a bad call from time to time. I think I was making one just last September when this photo was taken, in fact, and Keith Bildstein, who is perched on the rock above me, turned around and corrected me. Heh. Heh. It was a broadwing, and I was calling it a sharpie. Duh. Outta shape, Zickefoose? Well, on your bird ID you are. Besides. Who wears pants like THAT at South Lookout??

And it's clear from what I wrote that I was cornfused. I even  mentioned the dark cap as being atypical for a sharpie, but I didn't know it was contraindicated. 

And those spindly legs? Well, I guess it's a Cooper's with spindly legs. What do I know? Not much. Relative closeness of eye to bill? So a Cooper's hawk's eye is closer to its bill than to the back of its head? Ohh kay. Now that you say it, I guess I can see it. And I love it. Who knew? Not me. Others. 

I warned you that I was paddling around the shallow end of bird ID. And now two great big sharks have cruised in to set me straight, and I couldn't be more pleased about it.

Because for me, and for any naturalist who is driven by curiosity and the desire, above all, to get it right, the point of all this is to ferret out the truth. And the truth is out there. And I've got two nice private messages from two experts to prove it. That feels good. Knowing what the bird is feels even better.

Me and Keith at Hawk Mountain's South Lookout, September 2014

Photo by Diane Husic

Thank you, Big Sharks! It's a Cooper's hawk. Well, dip me in chocolate. 

 

The End.

Humblest thanks to Kenn Kaufman, Keith Bildstein, and gardnie 07 (comments section of the original post), all of whom set me straight and taught me a thing or five.

Sharp-shin or Cooper's?

There's been a hawk strafing our feeders this winter. I'd seen enough of it to know it was an adult: gunmetal blue above and rust below, and it was in that gray area of size that makes its species really hard to call. It's the size of a small male Cooper's, or a big female sharp-shin.

That's what makes this ID conundrum (sharp-shinned vs. Cooper's hawk) so devilishly difficult for all but the bird ID oracles. Plumage coloration isn't a whole lot of help, as we'll see below. You've got to go on structure and proportion. On how big the head and bill are relative to the body. And then you have to consider that there's a continuum of sizes that goes from 

small male sharp-shin (barely larger than a mourning dove)

to large female sharp-shin

which is about the size of a small male Cooper's hawk

which is much smaller than a big female Cooper's hawk.

Phew. The overlap zone is tough.

So when I spotted a medium-sized accipiter sitting placidly back in the trumpetvine tangle just off our bird feeding area, I started collecting images of it. At first glance, I thought it might be a Cooper's hawk. When it sleeked down, it seemed to have that hatchet-headed look, and the sooty well-defined cap that often characterizes an adult Cooper's hawk.

And then it raised its crest and I vacillated back to sharp-shinned. 

When its head was puffed up, its bill looked small in proportion to its head. That made me lean toward sharp-shinned, too. As did Corey, who was already calling it a sharp-shinned. :)

I wasn't sure what it was doing there--basking in the sun on this frigid day in the teens? 

until it leant down and picked at something in its talons. Ah! You have prey!

It was so interesting to see the feeder birds going about their business as if there were no hawk there at all. They didn't waste any time. Knew the hawk was at rest and well-fed and thus no danger to them.

As Corey said, "Too bad for Joe, there, but we've got things to do."

 The confounding thing for me was that I couldn't see its legs or feet. And this was a problem because oddly enough, I use those to clinch ID on ambiguous birds on the sharp-shin/Cooper's spectrum.  I decided to settle in with my camera (I'm shooting from inside the studio) and wait until it moved, and I got a glimpse of those legs.

I didn't have to wait long. The bird decided it didn't appreciate being stared at by me, Phoebe and Corey, and it picked up its prey and hopped quickly into deep cover. Oh yes. It was watching us just as closely as we were watching it.

 

I pressed the shutter as fast as I could, hoping I'd get something on both legs and prey.

And this is the shot that clinched the ID for me.  Funny shot, actually, of an awkwardly running, heavily laden hawk. Hard to run on those Dolly Parton claws. 

Those are the spindly legs of an adult female sharp-shinned hawk! Wahoo!

But what did she have in her bill? She'd plucked it practically naked, and eaten more than half of it.

I hoped hard it wasn't my beloved hermit thrush, who spooks around in just that part of the border.

Very impressive black cap for a sharpie. But sharpie she is. See how her legs are pencil-thin when viewed from the front? Those are the sharp, blade-like "shins" of the tarso-metatarsus of a sharp-shin.

The best view. Now her bill looks dainty; her head smallish in relation to her body. It all falls into place as soon as I can see her legs. 

We were itching to know what bird had gone down for her midday meal.

Clearly, it was big enough to give her a Mae West crop!

And it was all but gone, just a few bones left.

I always love to see a hawk get a nice meal. I was hoping hard she'd snagged one of the dozen starlings that have been crapping all over our deck and gobbling down almost every bit of my Zick Dough since the big freeze clamped down. 

We were all heading into town, so we crept out the front door to the garage so as not to frighten her off. She was still eating when we left. We got home around 9 PM and Corey and I went out with his flashlight. She must've plucked it wherever she initially killed it, and brought it to this tangle to eat it in peace. Couldn't find a durn feather, until Corey picked up a couple little bunches of dark greasy green breast feathers, edged in buff. Starling!!

Thank you. Please come back soon and grab as many starlings as you can.  

Here are a couple of my photos of Cooper's hawks, to show their more substantial legs:

A Texas Cooper's, showing sturdy legs, large deep bill, and hatchet-head.

A  juvenile Cooper's from West Virginia. Big ol' feet, strong legs, nicely graduated almost cuckoo-like tail. Head in good proportion to its body. Sharpies often look pin-headed and goggle-eyed to me, especially the little males.

Just for fun, and to illustrate how subtle this stuff can be, I've asked permission to post some of my friend Ellen Pemrick's photos of a bird, almost identical in plumage to ours, in her yard not far from Schenectady, New York. She had decided it was a Cooper's hawk.

 photo by Ellen M. Pemrick

I stared at these photos for a long time, perhaps seduced in part by its similarity to "my" sharpie. I was going back and forth in my mind, but in the end the bill looked too deep and heavy, the head too angular to be a sharp-shin's.

 photo by Ellen M. Pemrick

The Cooper's head has a more angular, hatchet-like quality, and is larger in proportion to its body than a sharpie's. 

When I asked, Ellen provided another shot, that shows a nicely rounded tail, with marked gradation in the lengths of the feathers. Though Corey tells me that this rounded tail can be seen on female sharp-shins, the features I can see on this bird add up to Cooper's, at least for me. Would have loved to see its legs, but we aren't always granted the look we want.

 photo by Ellen M. Pemrick

I hope you've enjoyed this little diversion into accipiter ID, and found it helpful.  Thanks to Ellen Pemrick for loan of her photos!

Disclaimer: By and large, I stay away from thorny ID problems. Although a lot of people send me photos of mystery birds, and I can usually help, I don't consider myself an ID oracle. If bird ID is an Olympic swimming pool, I'll paddle around in the shallow end, thank you. Leave the tough stuff to the big sharks. Who are welcome to cruise in and add to the discussion. I've found it helps a lot to be open to learning from people who know more than I do; to check one's ego at the door in any discourse about bird identification. Tall order for a Leo, but I try.

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