A Visitor From The West (CT)

[Donna]

Earlier this week I was driving on Interstate 691 near the Cheshire-Southington line when an all-dark hawk caught my attention. It was perched in a tree close to the shoulder of the highway, but I came up on it too quickly to get a decent look. The bird wasn’t big enough to be an eagle, which normally would lead me to one conclusion – a dark morph Rough-legged Hawk. However, the bird looked too bulky and the habitat too overgrown for that elegantly proportioned Buteo of the wide-open spaces. So I drove on to the Route 10 exit and doubled back. The hawk was still sitting in the same place on the return trip, and I was able to get a good look from both sides of the highway.

Closer inspection revealed the deep red tail of an adult Red-tailed Hawk, but a Red-tailed Hawk far different from the ones that nest throughout our area, pass through in migration and spend the winter. The subspecies of Red-tailed Hawk that nests in the East is not known to have a dark color morph. That meant that this was a western Red-tail of the subspecies calurus, a real rarity in our part of the country. How rare are dark Red-tails in the East? I’ve been birding for more than 50 years (I started really young!). This is only second one I’ve ever seen outside its normal range. The first was about 20 years ago in eastern Pennsylvania.

Last winter a dark Red-tail was reported hanging around Interstate 91 in the Wallingford area. Given the proximity to the I-691 site and the rarity involved, I think there’s a good chance this is the same individual. The bird’s presence along a busy highway, coupled with this week’s bad weather, has prevented anyone getting photos, but Jim Zipp of Hamden, probably Connecticut’s most experienced observer of raptors, provided the accompanying photo of a dark Red-tail that he took out West. Jim, who owns The Fat Robin, a birders’ store in Hamden, has also been birding for a long time, and he’s had only one possible observation of a dark bird in Connecticut. Dark Red-tails are quite variable. Jim’s photo shows one with a lot of rufous on the breast. Some are more solid blackish-brown. The one I saw was probably somewhere in between, with a rufous wash across its brown breast.