Welcome to World Bird Wednesday
When you only have a moment to take in the characteristics of a bird it is easy for the new birder to make inadvertant misidentifacations. Such was the case when this hawk landed in the tree next to the high bank.
"A Red Tailed Hawk," I announced authoritativly. Wrong.
One picture can be worth a thousand foggy recolections and in this case the eventual verdict was a Broad-Winged Hawk (Buteo platypterus). When viewed with a recent picture of a Red-Tailed Hawk, seen below, it's easy to see the obvious difference in the breast feathers which was our main clue.
Broad-Winged hawks enjoy their summers in Michigan an elsewhere in North America than migrate to Northern South America, about a 4,300 mile jaunt, to winter over. Once at their wintering grounds the Broad-Winged hawk keeps about a one square mile home range. They love to rid the forest of small rodents perched aloft as this one is before diving in to take their prey.
So be on guard young birders, mind your breast feathers or you too shall speak to hastily!
P.S. It seems there is some question that this may be a Red-shouldered Hawk. Did I speak to hastily again?
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| Bonus shot! |
The Red-Tailed Hawk
And now it's time for World Bird Wednesday!
This is the home of "World Bird Wednesday." It is a place for bird lovers from around the world to share their photo-blogs and birding experiences. The Blogosphere connects like minded people from around our planet like no other technology can do. Our fourth World Bird Wednesday will be open for posting at 12 noon Tuesday EST North America through noon on Thursday.
You are invited to link your blog with other bird photographers in a weekly celebration of these most diverse and beautiful of Earth's residents, the BIRDS!
Three easy steps!
#1. Simply copy the above picture onto your W.B.W. blog entry. It contains a link for your readers to share in WBW. Or you can copy this link on to your blog page to share W.B.W. http://pineriverreview.blogspot.com/
#2. Come to The Pine River Review on Tuesday Noon EST through Thursday Noon and submit your blog entry with Linky.
#3. Check back in during the course of the next day and explore these excellent photoblogs!
The thumbnails below are links to our contributors blogs where you can view their beautiful posts. The idea of a meme is that you will visit each others blogs and perhaps leave a comment to encourage your compadres.
Come on it's your turn!
