Quote of the Moment

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Wednesday, January 18, 2006


This bird was in my neighbor's yard today. After looking in a couple bird books, our best guess is a sharp-shinned hawk. His chin and talons are bloody, so he must have just eaten.
photo by A. Graf

4 comments:

Allie said...

sharp shinned hawk would be my guess. The eye bar (most likely not the technical name) threw me, but there isn't really another hawk with that kind of coloring.

How big was it?

Ann said...

This guy was small, maybe 8 or ten inches, not counting the tail. The "eye bar" is accentuated by shadows of the tree branches so it's hard to tell how much is coloring and how much just patterned light. Two weeks ago we had a long eared owl in our apricot tree. My neighbor saw it (she's a zookeeper in the bird house of our zoo), but it flew away 15 minutes before I got home that night. Rats.

Ann said...

Here's a great website that can help you tell the difference between the sharp shinned and the cooper's hawk. After comparison, I am even more convinced this was a sharp shinned hawk.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/AboutBirdsandFeeding/accipiterIDtable.htm

Allie said...

I am in love with the cornell ornithology lab. Any question I ever have about anything moderately bird related I take to them.