19

So I drove up from Gas City, IN today for work and was mostly driving on state roads and of course was keeping my eye out for hawks. I saw upwards of 20 Turkey Vultures and I counted exactly 19 Hawks either perched or in flight. I would say there's a high probability that they were all Red-Tailed although I was only able to identify (at 70mph) 4 for sure - 2 in flight where I saw the black patagial bars and 2 perched where I saw their red tails. I've searched online and found some pictures of the 3 variations I saw in coloring.

Interestingly, there were 2 variations that I found and they were grouped by location. While I was down near Kokomo I saw what I'll call the darker morph (although it is by no means what an actual dark morph Red-Tailed Hawk looks like), and as I drove north I saw a standard Eastern Red-Tailed Hawk. The difference in these were that the ones in the north had a much more obvious and lightly colored red head as with these:

You can see they have buff chests where the belly band is barely apparent, you can't see the red tail because of the angle, their actual head and face is red, and the outer feather are a very dark brown that contrast strongly with the belly. Down near Kokomo, the ones I saw did not have the obviously red head, but it looked more like their head was the same dark brown as their back and the belly band was more apparent as with the following picture.

That's still not a great representation of it. I also saw one where part of his face was white. Also I noticed that there was some white spotting on some of their wings as well.

This is the view I got of about 4 of them, which is from the underneath as they fly. You can see that all you really see is buff/white and those black patagial bars. If you're lucky and can concentrate on it, sometimes the sun shines through the tail so that you can see a slight red tint to the tail, but the tail is pale underneath and normally that's all you see.

Then, I was driving and saw a hawk perched low on the ground. He happened to be perched slightly to the side and I was able to see, very distinctly, his red tail, but he had an entirely pale head, like so:

That could have been what's called a Krider's Hawk, which is a subspecies of the Red-Tailed Hawk that has the white head. Juvenile Red-Tailed Hawks can have pale heads, but their tails are not red, and are instead black and white striped. I remember thinking that if I hadn't seen that red tail I would've had no idea what kind of hawk he was and just thought he was a "pale morph". But actually the top 2 pictures are considered (kind of) pale morphs because of their white chests. Most Eastern Red-Tailed Hawks have fairly pale chests and are considered (kind of, again) pale morphs. So I'm not going to go out on a limb and say with certainty that what I saw was a Krider's because I gather they're somewhat rare, but it may have been the mix of a Krider's and a regular Eastern. I gather the coloring variations are genetic, much like our differences in colors of hair and eyes. I suppose if Kriders average about 1 out of every 20, I'm on par for as many hawks as I saw today!

Anyway, I just thought it was interesting to note the geographic variations in coloring and am curious if that is how it works or was just a coincidence (or all in my head).

One day I'm going to write a book titled "Birdwatching at 70mph". I'm a little proud of myself for being able to notice all those details when I probably only saw each hawk for about 2 seconds. And don't worry - I am very careful when highspeed birdwatching :)