We have a fun week coming up!
(click on the image below for a bigger, non-blurry version)
Albatrossity
Some of you know that I spend a lot of time photographing the many varieties of hawks that winter here in Flyover Country. Some might call it an obsession. Some might be correct. Nonetheless I find it to be both educational and therapeutic, so that‘s what I do. Most of the hawks I photograph are Red-tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis), but I often will photograph Rough-legged Hawks (Buteo lagopus), as well as the several species of falcons that also spend the winter here. Rough-legged Hawks are the subject of today’s story.
This species is found across the Palearctic (for our European and UK readers, you know it as the Rough-legged Buzzard). It is a bird of open country with a breeding range in the tundra and taiga of the Far North, and a wintering range in open plains or steppes. It seems to choose both winter and summer territories on the basis of food availability, and is therefore more nomadic than most Red-tailed Hawks, who stick with a nesting and wintering territory through thick and thin most of the time. But because it spends most of its year in places with very few human inhabitants (Kansas included), there are a lot of things about the life history and migratory behavior that are a bit mysterious.
On The Road – Albatrossity – Rough-legged HawksPost + Comments (20)
That has started to change. Ten years ago some raptor researchers started the Rough-legged Hawk Project, dedicated to capturing Rough-legged Hawks and outfitting them with transmitters which allow them to be tracked (via satellite or cell phone towers) all year long. To date they have put transmitters on 180 individual hawks in 18 states, 2 Canadian provinces, and one territory. One of those was this guy, a young male captured in Jan 2021 in Lyman County SD. Here are the tracking data for him since he was banded (this map, and all the maps below, are courtesy of Neil Paprocki and the Rough-legged Hawk Project). The linear tracks are his travels in previous years, and the circular points are the fall and winter of 2023. Note that he started from the eastern shore of Hudson Bay this fall, and that he had been spending a lot of time in the Dakotas and Nebraska. Click here for larger image.
