>The bird's long wings, darkness, smallish size,
>and regular perch say "Merlin"--or at least a
>darn good imitation.

Along with this regular perch thing, in my experience, merlins preen
themselves far more frequently than any other raptor I'm familiar with.

Has anyone else noticed this?

This is junk science for sure, as my data is purely anecdotal :)

I first noticed this up at the Goshutes. The first interesting thing
is that there are a couple of snags on the west side of the ridge.
About 50% of the merlins I've observed being released from the
ridgetop - which we call "observation" and which is where we funnel
visitors - will perch in one of these snags after release. The
other species we band up there almost never do so - I've seen as
many merlins do so as all other species put together and we only
catch perhaps a dozen merlin per season (out of up to 4680 banded
birds a season)!

After perching, they will start preening. Of course, we've mussed
them up and have insulted their sense of personal pride by sticking
a ruler up their butt to measure tail length, so preening is a
reasonable response. Though sitting there fifty feet away from
one's tormentors may not be!

This is so reliable that I've used this pattern to get the photo of
a perched merlin that some of you may've seen on my web site. I
set up my telephoto and tripod before the bird was released, then
photographed it after it perched in this predictable spot!

After picking up on this behavior at our site, I began noticing that
merlins I see perched on exposed, leafless treetops in winter are
often preening...

Comments?

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, at (NEW) http://donb.photo.net