HAWKS AT A DISTANCE HAWKS AT A DISTANCE IDENTIFICATION OF MIGRANT RAPTORS JERRY LIGUORI Foreword by PETE DUNNE Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW nathist.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liguori, Jerry, 1966– Hawks at a distance : identification of migrant raptors / Jerry Liguori ; foreword by Pete Dunne. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-13558-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-691-13559-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Falconiformes—North America—Identification. 2. Falconiformes—Flight—North America—Pictorial works. 3. Falconiformes—Migration—North America. I. Title. QL696.F3L538 2011 598.9’44097—dc22 2010032990 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon LT Std text with Gill Sans Std display. Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In memory of Jon Jon Stravers, whose passion for raptors was unsurpassed and who loved and cherished the natural world Contents Foreword by Pete Dunne Preface Acknowledgments Introduction How to Use This Book Terminology Glossary Hawk Migration Helpful Hints Anatomy Flight Positions Hawk Counting Optics for Hawk Watching Photography Accipiters Sharp-shinned Hawk Cooper’s Hawk Northern Goshawk Northern Harrier Buteos Red-shouldered Hawk Broad-winged Hawk Swainson’s Hawk Red-tailed Hawk Ferruginous Hawk Rough-legged Hawk Falcons American Kestrel Merlin Peregrine Falcon Prairie Falcon Gyrfalcon Vultures, Osprey, Eagles Black Vulture Turkey Vulture Osprey Bald Eagle Golden Eagle Uncommon Migrants and Others California Condor Mississippi Kite White-tailed Kite Swallow-tailed Kite Hook-billed Kite Crested Caracara Short-tailed Hawk White-tailed Hawk Zone-tailed Hawk Shapes Photo Credits Bibliography Index Foreword It’s all about “the distance.” It’s always been about “the distance.” Ever since that first hominid ancestor fixed front-seated eyes on some dinosaur descendent, the challenge has been vaulting distance and getting across an invisible line. The line that defines the border between “Too Far” and “Close Enough.” Too Far. A region marked by frustration where birds lie beyond the limits of ambition and skill. Close Enough. A happy place where birds, and our designs upon them, meet and become one. Well, Close Enough just got closer (in fact, you are holding the keys to the kingdom in your hands) and Too Far just got pushed clear to the horizon. Jerry Liguori’s new book has redefined the art of hawk watching and pushed field guides to new heights. And distances! It’s been a long journey, the road to Far. In fact, it’s taken more than a hundred years for field guides to reach a point where our ability to detect birds and our ability to identify them lie within a wingspan of each other. But the human compulsion to pin names to birds goes back even farther—back to the time when the primary tool of bird study was the shotgun. Before the twentieth century the line between Close Enough and Too Far was much, much closer than it is today. Descriptions of birds applied to birds held in the hand (which is about as close as Far can get) and from the standpoint of identifying birds in the field they were about as far from useful as an instructional tool can be. Take, for example, this species description lifted from Frank M. Chapman’s “Handbook” entitled Birds of Eastern North America, first published in 1895. “Upper parts fuscous, more or less marginated with ochraceous or rufous; region below the eye black; ear coverts buffy; wings as in the ad; upper surface of the tail barred with grayish, under surface barred with ochraceous-buff; underparts cream-buff or ochraceous-buff, streaked, spotted or barred with black.” Anybody guess juvenile Peregrine? Thought not. But a new age in bird identification was just on the horizon. In 1906 Chester A. Reed published a handy, shirt-pocket-sized guide to the birds whose utilitarian genius lay in depicting as well as describing his subjects. The Chester Reed Guides featured painted illustrations of birds in natural settings. It was immensely popular and it even worked! Kind of. To a point. A point limited not only by distance but a perceptual misconception that led to a fundamental design flaw. The somewhat muted illustrations found in Reed’s guides attempted to portray birds as they might appear in the field to the unaided eye. The problem was Reed didn’t get it. Didn’t appreciate the fact that as birds get farther away, images don’t get fainter or fuzzier. In fact, just the opposite happens. Contrasts sharpen. Patterns not visible before tighten and become manifest. A string of dots running down the breast fuse into streaks. Translucent spots near the tips of outer flight feathers form a pale, crescent that bisects the tip of the wing. What Reed did was take a bird in the hand and make it look like it was being viewed through a dirty window. It wasn’t until 1934 that a field guide got the principles right. In the middle of the Great Depression a 25-year-old “student of birds” published a book that depicted birds as a viewer might see them using the finest optics of the day. The artist was Roger Tory Peterson. He was the proud owner of a pair of 4x Le-Maire binoculars—the state of the art in optical technology back when gas was ten cents a gallon and Shirley Temple made her film debut. If you’re interested in seeing what birds looked like using first-generation binoculars, open the pages of a first edition Peterson field guide and study the plates. You will discover that most of the illustrations are black and white. In the entire book there are only three color plates (and all the Eastern warblers are crammed onto one of these). Birds are depicted in rigid profile, viewed from the side. Tiny arrows direct viewers to each bird’s distinguishing traits, or “trademarks of nature,” as Peterson called them. Better known today as “field marks.” This was the book those proto-hawk watchers took with them onto ridge tops and out to the tips of peninsulas in the 1930s and 1940s. But once again and just like Reed’s, the illustrations fell a step behind reality and need. The “Peterson Principle” relied heavily upon plumage- based field marks and its focus was birds in the bush (not in the hand)—birding’s great leap forward in 1934. The illustrations in his guide simply didn’t correspond to the distant, flying forms that hawk watchers were finding in the sky—birding’s high frontier in 1934. No aspersion upon Peterson, whose contribution to bird identification was seminal and profound. It’s just that birding’s frontier is never static. As soon one barrier is vaulted, the challenge and frontier moves on. But one thing had not changed. This was the guiding principle that was the foundation of Peterson’s leap. The need to depict birds as they really appear. Here Peterson was smack on target and subsequent writers and illustrators have done little more than move field guides closer to that ideal just as they moved the limits of bird identification closer to the horizon. Take Richard Pough and Don Eckelberry’s Audubon Guides, first published in 1946. The illustrations, all of them in color, depicted birds in assorted, lifelike poses. Some turned this way; some that. Rigid was out; body language and posture were in. Forty years of watching live birds through optics, not over the barrels of shotguns, had brought us to this new level of awareness and discernment. While hawks were not shown in flight in the Audubon Guide, the illustrations of perched birds were excellent—a credit to Eckelberry’s discerning eye and artistic skills. OK, I lied. What I should have said was that the color “plates” depicted perched raptors. The written species accounts were accompanied by a black-and-white, line-art illustration of hawks in flight. But like Peterson, artist Eckelberry got lost in the details—showing plumage characteristics that were apparent at close range but not at a distance. Eckelberry’s sense of shape and proportion also fell short. But only twenty years after Peterson’s first guide (not to mention the founding of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary—the raptor “classroom in the clouds”) the improvement in how flying raptors were perceived and depicted was marked and manifest. Clearly, Eckelberry had observed a flying hawk or two. So too, artist Arthur Singer, the illustrator of Chandler Robbins’s Birds of North America, better known as the “Golden Guide” and published in 1966. In this popular guide, which is still available today, Singer illustrated all the raptors in color and in flight. Then he did something that stepped out of the static realm of mere field identification and into the more dynamic hawk-watching arena. Capping the individual species accounts, Singer depicted all the raptors, in flight, on one comparative plate. For the first time in a popular guide, “students of birds” could compare relative size, plumage, and shape—just as hawk watchers do in the field. Yes, the birds still showed too much detail. Yes, the shapes still left something to be desired. But it was another step forward and the horizon took another step backward. In the 1960s and 1970s a tidy swarm of brochures, booklets, and books appeared that focused specifically upon the identification of birds of prey. The crash of raptor populations caused by the widespread and indiscriminate use of DDT had stoked a worldwide interest in raptors. More eyes searching the sky pushed the frontiers of raptor identification farther and farther, and it was during this period that my own fascination with birds of prey began. First in the woodlands and fields behind my parents’ home in suburban North Jersey. Later, starting in 1974, at Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, and well-known hawk-watching junctions in New Jersey. Unknown to me, two other young “students of birds” were evolving into ardent raptor fanciers too. One was a Cape May native named Clay Sutton. The other was the son of Yale ornithologist Fred Sibley, growing up in Connecticut. His name was David. Drawn, ultimately and perhaps inexorably, to the hawk-watching hotbed that is Cape May, New Jersey, the three of us came to craft a book called Hawks in Flight—a book dedicated to the identification of migrating raptors. Published in 1987, following on the heels of Bill Clark and Brian Wheeler’s Hawks, this guide, too, is still in print. Some of the most talented younger field birders raising glasses today have said that Hawks in Flight changed the way they looked at birds. One of these, it delights me to say, was Jerry Liguori—the raptor authority whose first book, Hawks From Every Angle, was ground breaking and whose new book, Hawks at a Distance, is game changing. Far, now, has no place to run and no place to hide. So what distinguishes this new photo-driven guide? Precisely that! The wealth of well- chosen images, harvested from the sky, depicting distant birds in flight. Just as optics were the game changer that allowed students of birds to redirect their attention from the bird in the hand to the bird in the bush, then the sky, digital photography has made it possible to snatch those images from the sky and portray them, vividly, accurately, and in a multitude of postures in a book. You can spend thousands of hours studying distant raptors in the effort to anchor a multitude of search images in your mind. Or you can open the pages of Hawks at a Distance and “drink this in,” as my hawk-watching mentor, Floyd P. Wolfarth, would have encouraged.