Seriously sharp.
Little Miss Sharp-shin has a big presence.
Banding season is underway. Just sharing a few photos from the season so far...
I posted this redtail in the comments last week - he was a really nice, healthy bird with some really interesting coloration (if you're into nuance of western redtail plumage ...which, of course, I am). You can see he's fairly pale below. His patagial marks (that dark bit on the leading edge of the wing) are a reddish brown, rather than the solid walnut brown that is more typical. Very lightly marked under the wings as well.
His tail had really wavy bands and a lot of reddish tones - that's not a trick of the camera, it just had all of that red at the edges of the feathers and bordering the tail bands.
It's a little hard to capture with a camera, but he also had a hint of purple iridescence on his shoulders. I have only seen this a few times, but it was very noticeable as we were looking at him up close.
He got a color band - the large print bands that can be read more easily in the field. I hope he is sighted again and reported - would really like to know more about this bird.
Another thing that you don't often see... sometimes you catch a photo of a bird's nictitating membrane (the third - translucent - eyelid) but it's pretty rare to be able to see the veins in it. A few years ago, I got a photo of a redtail that showed this, and now a coop.
When I started setting up our site last week, I almost stepped on half a mouse. I'm assuming that it wasn't an owl that got it, because they usually eat their prey whole. It was very fresh when I found it.
Hmmmm... perhaps Madame Kestrel knows something about it. She's obviously finished a meal fairly recently.
What a beauty she was.
A merlin chilling out in hand. What I think is kind of cool about this is that you can actually see a bit more of the eye color. Most of the time, falcon eyes just look like big black pools (like on the kestrel above).
This shows the merlin's tomial "tooth" - a special adaptation of falcons' bills. The notch helps them sever the spinal cord of their prey, dispatching them quickly.
If you're in the Bay Area and are wandering around today, come up to Hawk Hill in the Marin Headlands. I'll be giving a banding talk around 1:00pm, as part of the GGRO's docent program (come at noon for the hawk talk about migration, ID etc.)