Tales from the platform

Red-tailed Hawk - Luke Tiller

Hawkcount does an amazing job helping us tally the migration of hawks across the Americas. I can safely say that without being accused of being biased as I have nothing to do with its design or upkeep here at HMANA. This month is also Hawkcount Now and Forever fundraising month (which you can read more about here). One of my most recent discoveries is how easy Hawkcount's simple interface makes it to update via your smartphone while you are in the field - I wish I'd noted that when I was actively counting this season!  As someone who uses it on a regular basis as a hawkwatcher and trawls through it to write up flyway accounts it does have some limitations when it comes to capturing some of the more esoteric moments of a season in a way that is readily accessible to those scanning through the reports.

Bobcat @ Quaker Ridge - Shaun Martin

A cursory scan of the front page of Hawkcount does allow readers to pick up good rare raptors like the pair of Mississippi  Kites I had one day at Quaker Ridge, CT (blog post here) or the Gyrfalcon at Braddock Bay, NY, but what it captures less effectively is the dark Broad-winged Hawk or completely white Turkey Vulture (picture here) I had at Braddock. A cursory scan of the Hawkcount front page gives you the numbers from a days count, but no real feel for a day that over a thousand Broad-winged Hawks passed at treetop height during the last hour of the watch at Quaker Ridge while all assembled looked on astounded as the birds passed by or settled in around us.

Cave Swallow - Luke Tiller

Hawkcount is a great tool for capturing raw raptor data, but it doesn't always highlight all of the excitement of what we do and why we do it unless you start to thoroughly explore each report. Buried in the notes of these reports are the time Cave Swallows soared over Quaker Ridge long enough for me to run inside and get members of staff out to witness only the second inland appearance of this species in the state (pictures here), the Sandhill Cranes tracked from Cape Cod, MA all the way to Scott's Mountain, NJ via our watch (and their return visit the next year), the five Snowy Owls visible at the same time from the platform at Braddock this April or a flock of grackles I witnessed that would have rivaled many of Audubon's florid descriptions of Passenger Pigeon flocks.

Star-nosed Mole - Luke Tiller

Sightings of rare butterflies, the star nosed mole that sent hawkwatchers running around the Audubon Greenwich Center to get a net to scoop him out of a storm drain he had tumbled into (blog post here) or the Bobcat that sauntered across the hawkwatch lawn at Quaker Ridge (facebook page here), which Shaun Martin managed to snap photos of last week. It's these kind of stories that make spending hours watching for raptors so special. It's these kind of stories we want to share with other hawkwatchers. So please share them with us and allow us to give them a wider audience among your fellow hawkwatchers,  HMANA members and supporters. Send us your blog posts and links to photographs and allow us to share those stories with the rest of the community. You can send them in a message to us on facebook via our page (here) or email them to info@hmana.org

Historical Harlan's: Second US East Coast Record?

Harlan's Hawk - Braddock Bay Raptor Research

So about a year I stuck up a blog (here) with photographs of some dark buteos either seen (but mainly banded) at Braddock Bay in Western New York State, which is incidentally the base camp for the 2015 HMANA Raptor ID Workshop (details here). The attached photographs were taken at BBRR's main banding station on May 1st 2003 and through the magic of the internet the pictures from this blog ended up with Jerry Liguori. After carefully studying the pictures he confirmed that the bird pictured here is in fact an image of an incredibly regionally rare Harlan's Red-tailed Hawk. To give you an idea of how rare, there is one accepted US Harlan's record east of central Kentucky in eBird and this is the first with photographic documentation. There is at least one accepted record for Ontario but none for New York State

Harlan's Hawk breeds in Alaska and northwestern Canada, but spends winters as far east as the Mississippi Alluvial Valley. It's plumage was distinct enough for it to have initially been considered a separate species by Audubon, when he sent the type specimen to the British Museum in 1831. In 1891 it was relegated to a subspecies of Red-tailed Hawk, though it was elevated to species level again for thirty years in 1944. Though currently lumped with Red-tailed Hawk there are at least a couple of raptor experts who lobby for it to be reinstated as a species. 

Dark/Rufous Red-tailed Hawk and friend - Catherine Hamilton

The 1995 Virginia record is probably pretty reliable given that it was seen from Kiptopeke Hawkwatch by Brian Sullivan one of the authors of this excellent ABA article that discusses successfully identifying the subspecies (here). Dark Red-tailed Hawks of any kind do not breed in the east and sightings of dark birds are rare in and of themselves. Frank Nicoletti actually helped the group tally a stunning adult dark/rufous morph at the 2014 Raptor ID Workshop among the other 10,928 passing raptors, but as you can see from the picture above, assigning some of these to subspecies can be pretty tough given that sightings at hawkwatches can often be frustratingly distant and/or views tantalizingly brief.

The roundabout way this record came to be uncovered probably highlights two of the most important recent developments in birding and hawkwatching: the import of the digital camera and the value of the internet. As my friend Pete said, quoting the old Joni Mitchell lyric: "Sometimes you don't know what you've got till it's gone" Thanks to Jerry Liguori for bringing this record to light and to Daena Ford at BBRR for loaning me the photographs for the original article.

Harlan's Hawk - Braddock Bay Raptor Research

EDIT: Since writing this piece I have uncovered at least one more accepted Eastern record from North Carolina coincidentally also from 2003 (more here).