Dennis:
> I'll take a guess at an immature Red-tailed Hawk, although if there were a
> really conspicuous white rump patch, that seems to indicate otherwise.
> Certainly not a harrier from your description. Maybe there was just a
> little bit of white on the rump? Did the white really go all the way
> around the neck, or just partway? Young red-tails can be quite tame. I
> don't think you would have described an immature accipiter in this way, and
> there's really not much else it can be.

"When in doubt, redtail" - that's my motto! Whenever people describe
a "wierd raptor" one can almost always pin it down to our common buteo
friend.

Immy redtails can show a surprising amount of white at the base of
the tail (let's ignore Harlin's). Folks often don't realize that
the base of their tail feathers are pale and often the coverts
don't cover this completely. This is almost always apparent
in flight, when viewed from above.

And the head pattern is one I've seen quite often, indeed in
Arizona there are quite a few immy redtails that have very, very
pale whitish heads but look more or less normal from the neck
down.

Actually, accipters, especially young ones, can be quite tame
though. I sat and watched one perched on a tree just off a
Columbia Gorge trail many years ago, maybe ten feet away - an
adult Cooper's hawk with a blood-red eye. It watched me, too.
And we've had all sorts of friendly accipiters hang out at our
banding site in Nevada - friendly because of our caged lure
birds, though, not our endearing personality or good looks.

A couple years ago we had a baby goshawk hanging around
from the nest site just outside camp that you'd swear had
imprinted on people (though she was fledged before we ever
showed up). "Gidget the goshawk". Gidget was a sad case,
she'd come up to where the observers hang out and perch
for hours in the only tree (a snag) on the very top of the
ridge and beg, beg, beg. The she'd fly down to her favorite
banding station to try and beg a pigeon or two from the
trappers. Almost killed a sharpie one day, after it became
entangled in a net.

One day I had to throw rocks at her to chase her away. She'd
sit screaming in a tree a hundred yards from the banding station
and none of the smaller accipiters would come near it.

It was clear she didn't know how to hunt, unfortunately. We
banded her at the beginning of the season, and later in September
caught her again to weigh her and she'd lost 200 grams (of her
original 950 or so, she was already in bad shape as our typical
intermountain west mamma baby gos weighs in at 1000-1200 grams).

We had a bit of an ethical problem on our hands, as some folks
wanted to feed her. But since she couldn't hunt (or at least
was never observed to try, and we had her in almost constant
view) those of us in charge said "no" - it wouldn't do any
good and just prolong her fate. It wasn't a matter of just
being underweight because of a short dry spell, our raptor
migration season coincides closely with the local passerine
migration and the place is also full of Clark's nutcracker
and pinon jay, flickers, sapsucers, all good gos-sized food.
If she couldn't get it done in the midst of such plenty, she
wasn't going to make it through winter even if we helped her
out in the fall.

Hard-hearted? Cruel? Practical?

She disappeared one day, presumed dead of starvation.


- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>