{"id":78558,"date":"2019-11-21T05:49:47","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T12:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=78558"},"modified":"2019-11-21T07:24:46","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T14:24:46","slug":"a-ferruginous-hawk-and-a-red-tailed-hawk-with-unusual-plumages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2019\/11\/21\/a-ferruginous-hawk-and-a-red-tailed-hawk-with-unusual-plumages\/","title":{"rendered":"A Ferruginous Hawk And A Red-tailed Hawk With Unusual Plumages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two raptors that caught my eye recently because of their out of the ordinary plumages.<\/p>\n

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This is a dark morph Ferruginous Hawk in the west desert four days ago. It was soaring quite far away as it hunted and for some reason I never did get sharply focused on it but with its overall dark rufous brown plumage combined with nearly white flight feathers ventrally there’s no question that it’s a dark morph.<\/p>\n

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At one point it dove on potential prey from high above. Here I caught it just above the ground near the end if its stuttering plunge. Immediately after I took this shot it abandoned the attempt and flew back to height to hunt some more.<\/p>\n

I rarely see dark morphs. By far most Ferruginous Hawks I see are the much more common light morphs. Cornell’s Birds of North America Online says that dark morphs constitute only 0-10% of individuals in various populations studied. Some folks who pay attention to stuff like this have never even seen a dark morph. In almost 12 years of photographing birds I believe I’ve only photographed a dark morph Ferruginous Hawk two or three times so this bird definitely got my attention.<\/p>\n

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This is what a fairly typical and much more common light morph Ferruginous Hawk looks like so you can see why the dark morph really stands out.<\/p>\n

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The day before I photographed the dark morph Ferruginous Hawk I encountered this immature Red-tailed Hawk at Farmington Bay WMA. The lighting conditions were horrible for photography because the hawk was in deep shade as the sun rose over the mountains behind it (my shutter speed was only 1\/80 at ISO 800 if that tells you anything).<\/p>\n

What stands out for me about this bird is the sharply defined bright white spots on its scapulars and back. Many red-tails have whitish markings there but they’re much more diffuse and not so bright. I think they’re so distinctive and well defined on this bird they look like polka dots.<\/p>\n

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Here’s a young immature Red-tailed Hawk for the sake of comparison. In my experience this bird is far more typical of the species.<\/p>\n

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And this is an intermediate morph adult.<\/p>\n

Neither hawk I’ve featured here is rare but they’re different enough that I took notice so I thought my readers might be interested in seeing them too.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Two raptors that caught my eye recently because of their out of the ordinary plumages.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78559,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,334,2782,377,450],"tags":[452,531,969,1008,138,768,190,451,311],"class_list":["post-78558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","category-ferruginous-hawks","category-red-tailed-hawks","tag-buteo-jamaicensis","tag-buteo-regalis","tag-dark-morph","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-ferruginous-hawk","tag-immature","tag-juvenile","tag-red-tailed-hawk","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/11\/ferruginous-hawk-7449-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-kr4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}