Harassed

At the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, just before leaving for NJ for the summer, I heard a crash in the leaf litter, finding this Red-tailed Hawk picking at its feet, searching for the mouse/squirrel/bird it was going after.


I don't think it actually caught anything and quickly found itself vulnerable to harassment as a Blue Jay repeatedly mobbed it.

Young Red-tailed

Huge Day

Wow. I just got home from a 12 hour day of nonstop banding. To start the day off we caught 165 passerines in about one hour. At least two of the nets had 40 or 50 birds in them on the first check, the most I've ever seen by far. Of the 165, 104 of them were Nashville Warblers. After about an hour of banding songbirds I went over to the main raptor trapping blind and extracted and banded primarily sharpies for a couple of hours. By the time I left that station we were up to over 60 raptors. I then headed over to the Paine Farm trapping blind to help with the rush of birds there. By the end of the day the three stations had accumulated just under 400 raptors for the day and nearly 600 birds including passerines. And now I'm off to set up the nets for owls tonight...

SY RTHA

Bad pictures of this guy today, hopefully I get some better ones if I'm awake for any of the others caught this fall. Hatch year Broad-winged Hawk caught be Frank:


This second year Red-tailed Hawk was caught at one of the other trapping blinds today by Chris, making it the first adult I've see in hand. Note the older, shorter, browner feathers in the wing, making it a second year.

Big first day

Whoa, big first day here in Duluth...50 birds at the main bling, including five species of hawk.

Cooper's Hawk


Red-tailed


Harrier


And a slow release

So Far

So far today we have two gos, an RT, and a little male shin. In total we have around 1750 birds.

This short video is a good example of how quick accipiters are. An RT would not be able to take off like this.


The RT from today

My First Red Tail

Yesterday was our first break from terrible weather and we finally got to see big numbers of buteos flying. The problem was that the winds were so high that few birds were willing to come down. I got a shin, a gos, and FINALLY my first red tail. That was only our fifth of the year, and should have at least four times as many, but something's funky with them this year.

Comparison

I don't have much new to show, but I thought I'd put up a comparison post. A lot of these pictures are repeats but I separated them by genus and labeled them by age and sex if I knew it. We still haven't caught some varieties (like an adult male harrier) and I'm missing pictures of a few (like a female kestrel), but I thought this would give a good look at the hawks we have been catching, with side-by-side comparisons to show some differences.

Falcons:
Immature Merlin


Immature male kestrel




Immature peregrine





Accipiters:
Sharp-shinned
Two immature birds, female on the left, male on the right:


Two adults with different shades of the eyes:




Cooper's
Immature:


Adult:


Northern goshawk
Immature



Buteos
Broad-winged
Immature:


Red-tailed
Immature:
These are three different birds






Circus:
Northern harrier
Immature


Adult female

Larbear

The winds have been stellar, the birds have been flying, but the luck isn't there. We've seen around 80 redtails in the last two days and have only managed to pull in one for good. At one point today we had two perched around the blind, and two others circling overhead. Despite repeated stoops and a very near miss (due to a malfunctioning bownet) we have had little success.

RT


Adult male shin with a little bit of eye discoloration in the left corner


SURPRISE!


Feeding the swet

Parents weekend

This past weekend my parents came out for a visit and got a chance to see some of what I've been doing. Though the days were really (very) slow with hawks, they got to see a few shins come in and at least get a good idea of how exactly things function at the station. The nights were a different story however, with two of our biggest nights at 85 and 69 saw whets and it got kind of crazy.

Despite the lack of hawks and a bit of rain, my dad came out of the trip with an awesome set of pictures which I will gradually be putting up pictures from.


Photo by my pa


Photo by my pa

The day before they came we actually had a great hawk day, with 4 goshawks and a redtail. RT on left, G on right:




Gos scream a lot


American pipit's long back talon


My parents did get some stellar rainbows


Black backed woodpecker


Saw whet with a white talon

aRT

Caught our first red tail today. I missed it coming in, as I was asleep, but it was still a very cool bird.