Wow, somebody is pissed off at #7! Yikes. Wonderful set.
Albatrossity
Because I take way too many pictures of hawks, I sometimes get contacted by hawk researchers to get more details about some of the bird images I post on FaceBook or on eBird. This is a great way for me to learn more about the birds and the folks who study them.
One of those contacts led to a small adventure in late February, when I had the privilege of accompanying Bryce Robinson and Luke Decicco, of the Red-tailed Hawk Project, on an expedition to trap, tag, and perhaps put transmitters on some of our winter-resident dark hawks. Bryce is a graduate student at Cornell, and Luke is a graduate student at the University of Kansas, just down the river from my town of Manhattan KS. They are interested, like lots of others, in the multitude of plumage variations in Red-tailed Hawks, and are working to figure out the summer breeding locations for some of the dark redtails who winter here on the Great Plains. You can read more about the project here.
It was a blustery overcast day when I met up with them in the morning to find and trap and tag some of the birds I have been tracking locally. Per usual, the birds that I had located that might be of interest to them were either AWOL that morning, or ignored the trap. But finally they managed to get one of the birds that I had seen several times previously this winter. This guy.
On The Road – Albatrossity – Raptor Trapping and BandingPost + Comments (28)