On Sunday afternoon along the Lansing Center Trail, six curious snowmobilers and I witnessed a spectacular show by a dark-morph ROUGH-LEGGED HAWK. For more than 45 minutes, we watched this bird kiting, hovering, and occasionally perching with improbable equipoise on tiny treetop twigs. A couple of times, the Rough-legged Hawk, upon hearing the cry of a Red-tailed Hawk nearby, turned its head and glanced over in mid-hover, momentarily revealing the stunning contrast of yellow cere, black head and bill, and pearly gray sky. Then in an instant, the Rough-legged Hawk resumed the search for prey on the ground as if its attention had never been broken.
It was probably my most gratifying encounter ever with this species. I feel I gained insight about why people commonly note the exquisite beauty of dark-morph Rough-legged Hawks, but don't give nearly such recognition to Turkey Vultures. I think the difference lies mostly with proportion, balance, and grace of movement, and to a lesser extent, color and details of pattern, especially the framing effect of dark-tipped flight feathers. It occurred to me that similarly subtle criteria may apply to prevailing aesthetic standards for cars, as most arbiters of taste would favor a charcoal-black Porsche over a dark-brown Ford Granada. And as if the hawk alone weren't enough, I also saw an adult NORTHERN SHRIKE speeding between hedgerows and perching up for a long time at pretty close range. My shrike sighting was about half a mile northeast of Cayuga Vista Road, where at 4:45 PM I found no shrike but did see a NORTHERN MOCKINGBIRD bullying an AMERICAN ROBIN, a species arguably rarer than shrikes so far in 2013 in Lansing. (By the way, on Saturday I did see an adult shrike just north of the intersection of Scofield Road and Route 34B, near the bank of mailboxes for the apartment complex. Thanks, Stuart!) As Jay McGowan mentioned a couple of times this fall, the Lansing Center Trail is actually a network of paths along hedgerows and open weedy fields. It is accessible via a well-marked parking area along Route 34/34B, just west of the intersection with North Triphammer Road. Mark Chao -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
