What bird???

[Judy G. Russell]

So there I am, driving along in the car lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike, just north of Newark Airport. I glance over towards the truck lanes, and there in the median (a grassy area maybe 20 feet wide), sits this bird.

Now I don't ordinarily notice birds. (I'm a cat person, remember.) But it's kind of hard NOT to notice a great big raptor sitting in the median of the New Jersey Turnpike.

So... my guess was that it was somewhere between 18-24" tall, and probably at the high end of that range. A greyish brown rounded head, clearly the raptorial beak. Wings not spread so I couldn't get any sense of the coloration there. A pretty uniform light brown except for a scalloping effect to the feathers. Broad breast with the scalloping particularly noticeable (darker on the scalloped edge). Couldn't see the tail or feet (claws?).

I'd say a female broad-winged hawk except, frankly, I thought it was bigger than the 17" I saw on the web as the maximum size. It was THAT noticeable even with the median guards.

Anybody got any ideas what else it could have been?

[Christopher Carson]

Judy,

Could it have been a Red-tailed? They're about that size and if they're sitting on the ground you wouldn't see the reddish tail feathers. Another possibility is a Rough-legged. They are also about that size and have a good bit of variation in colors. Again, you probably wouldn't have been able to see their characteristic markings, a white rump patch and dark band at the tip of the tail. Probability would tend to say the Red-tailed since it's the most common hawk in New Jersey. The Rough-legged is termed a "rare winter visitor".

Chris


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[davidh]

Anybody got any ideas what else it could have been?
Global warming?

DH

[Judy G. Russell]

Could it have been a Red-tailed? They're about that size and if they're sitting on the ground you wouldn't see the reddish tail feathers. Another possibility is a Rough-legged. They are also about that size and have a good bit of variation in colors. Again, you probably wouldn't have been able to see their characteristic markings, a white rump patch and dark band at the tip of the tail. Probability would tend to say the Red-tailed since it's the most common hawk in New Jersey. The Rough-legged is termed a "rare winter visitor".

(a) Oooooops. My apologies! Didn't mean to post this in The Parlor (and if I had meant to, I should have posted it with an OT notation!).

(b) Not a red-tailed. The breast and body feather coloration was all basically the same, and every photo I can find of a red-tailed shows a much lighter breast than body.

(c) Trotting off now to look at rough-legged hawks...

[Lindsey]

Anybody got any ideas what else it could have been?
For what it is worth, there is a page on the red-tailed hawk that Chris spoke of here (http://www.desertusa.com/aug96/du_hawk.html). (Note, though, that the page says there can be considerable variation in the coloring of the plumage, so the picture may or may not help.)

The picture here (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide/Red-shouldered_Hawk_dtl.html) of the eastern form of the red-shouldered hawk seems to me to reflect the scalloping effect you described on the breast.

Fantastic photograph of a broad-winged hawk here (http://www.pbase.com/linda559/image/50859212).

Some good pictures of the rough-legged hawk Chris mentioned here (http://www.illinoisraptorcenter.org/Field%20Guide/roughleg.html), some more here (http://www.schmoker.org/BirdPics/RLHA.html), and several truly amazing ones here (http://www.pbase.com/clinton62/image/70157799). (These, too, apparently can have great variation in their coloring.) New Jersey is winter quarters for these guys, by the way.

I don't think I had fully appreciated how breathtaking these birds were in flight before looking at some of these pictures.

--Lindsey