I have finally learned not to respond to anything I read on my daily tweeters digest, because someone else will probably have done so already. I was just starting to write about Mark's bird being a Harlan's Red-tailed, when it dawned on me that the answer was probably already there. And sure enough Charlie and Bill had chimed in (and I knew that what they wrote would be Tweit Wright).

The only thing I have to add is that as soon as Mark described where the hawk was and what it was doing, I decided against Rough-legged without even seeing the photos. A Rough-legged Hawk would be a very unlikely sighting in a tall tree in a wooded part of Tacoma, whereas that's perfect Red-tail habitat.

Even though the pale head makes this bird indeed look like a Rough-leg (partly my fault; I have told years of bird classes that Rough-legs are easily distinguished from Red-tails by their pale head), the markings across the underparts are typical Red-tail. Light-morph Harlan's are much paler than typical Red-tails, as are Krider's, but as Bill wrote, Krider's are much less likely to be in western WA than Harlan's, even the rare light morph of the latter.

Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net