northeast-flora-and-fauna

This Red-tailed Hawk was looking around the area, presumably checking for both potential threats and potential meals. (I'm assuming it wasn't sure whether I was the former, and was more confident that I wasn't the latter.) This hawk had the size and shape of a Red-tailed Hawk, but didn't obviously display either of my favorite field marks for the species: Maybe you can interpret there to be a little burnt orange color on the tip of tail that's visible in the 1st picture, but it looks more brown in the 2nd picture. I'm not sure whether to attribute this to youth or lighting. While young Red-tailed Hawks do have brownish tails, the better look at the tail looked like it was shaded by the hawk's body, perhaps obscuring some orange coloring. Most of this area's Red-tailed Hawks have a brown-speckled "belly band". When I enlarge the picture I think I see a speckle or 2, but far less than usual for these hawks. My explanation for this is that some s...

Here's a picture of a European Starling from last autumn. These are generally the birds of murmuration fame [1]. In the picture this starling is in its winter (non-breeding) plumage. This consists of dark but speckled feathering; in breeding plumage they lose the speckles but gain a shiny look like this pair . Although we're used to many birds having breeding and non-breeding plumage, some birds like our European Starlings also change their beak color durinng the year. In warmer weather their beaks are a light yellowish color but in winter it becomes essentially black. It's possible that the black beak, containing beak-strengthening melanin , may help them crunch hard seeds during the winter. (In the summer they preferentially eat softer invertebrates.) Depending on the angle, their beaks can look fairly long. If someone who's not very bird-knowledgeable tells you they have a "black woodpecker" in their yard, they might really be seeing a starling [2]. Octob...