Hawking Around

Just before the storm, a friend who lives in Manhattan’s Chinatown sent me this phone picture of a raptor she saw on a playground on the edge of the Al Smith Houses. She wanted to know what it was.

When I first started to bird-watch, I found the raptors a challenge. Still do. Some are quite far off. Some are very fast. Our usual falcons — from smallest to largest, the Kestrel, Merlin, and Peregrine — have very similar silhouettes. Our two Accipiters, the Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s Hawks, also look pretty damn similar to each other. Among the species of big soaring hawks, the Buteos, we generally only see one in the city, the Red-tailed Hawks. These should be familiar to everyone now, since they are all over the city and the media: “Pale Male,” the pair that nests at NYU’s Bobst Library, etc. Of course, there can be some variety among the Red-tailed: Pale Male is so called because he is particularly pale on the front. And first year birds do not have the red — really brick or rufus — -colored tail feathers.

Anyway, with experience you begin to learn shape/silhouette, habitat & behavior, flight style, etc. You set a sense of what the bird should be, even if you only see it briefly or distantly. Birders call this “jizz,” which stems from the WWII military acronym GISS, or General Impression of Size and Shape — originally of an aircraft. Think about it. If you see a plane approaching — fast, but still pre-jet era, so not that fast — it’s critical to recognize it as friend or foe. You don’t want to fire on a friend; but you must to fire on a foe ASAP. This is made easier because every species, as it were, of airplane is different. Size, shape, engine noise, etc. When your life becomes dependent of knowing the characteristics of each of those plane types…. Now, some birders may feel their life depends on identifying a bird, but it’s really the technique that is being adopted, not the survival mechanism. Jiss is thus similar to gist, getting or grasping “it” instantly. Some suggest that the term is also influenced by “gestalt.”

So what’s the gestalt of Marion’s bird? Big, bulky, Buteo-y. Now, that tail looks longish in comparison to the rest of the body (see below), but also rather broad, so I’m not really getting any sense that this is a falcon or an Accipiter. Yet a big female Cooper’s isn’t impossible, given what may be a rufus bared chest. But I think Buteo, and that should mean, this time of year in Manhattan, a Red-tailed Hawk. But this is awfully dark for one of our Eastern Red-tails (it was twilight, but the playground lamps were lighting up the bird). And the coloring, or at least as much as we can see, is actually suggestive of a Red-shouldered Hawk. Marion reported a lot of rufus on the wings; she’s not a hard-core birder, but she is a great colorist. A Red-shouldered seems improbable on Manhattan in winter, but not impossible.

Anyway, a couple of days later, I met up with her to look around the area just in case the bird was hanging around. The Houses have a lot Planetrees to perch in, and the rats love playgrounds…. We had no luck.

But, walking down Henry St., I heard a falcon. Overhead, a Kestrel (Falco sparverius) was harrying a big ol’ pale-bellied buteo. Wow, the size differential between these two! The feisty little falcon, the size of a Mourning Dove, “klee”-ing at the much larger hawk with its broad wings. Forgetting I had the monochrome feature on, and not noticing this through my sunglasses, I got a few pictures of the hawk when it landed on a water tower. This was not Marion’s bird. But it was a Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis). The pale markings on the wing tell us this even without any color. Based on size, I’d say this was a female (among raptors, females are always bigger than the males, sometimes quite markedly so); she took off, disappeared, and then re-appeared, being chased now by two American Crows towards East Broadway. When we rounded the corner, we saw her perched atop another building. Now, even given that this is foreshortened, notice how short the tail here looks in comparison to the rest of the robustly shaped bird. Very Buteo; falcons and accipiters have long slender tails in comparison to their lean bodies. The scapular V-shape of the white edged feathers coming together on the closed wings can now be seen. All Eastern Red-tails will have this; there are some very dark morphs in the West where this isn’t the case. Confirmed through bins that this was indeed a mature Red-tailed. Meanwhile, the Kestrel. My angle practically right underneath it, the bird at the top of a classic five-story walkup. You can’t tell much with this image, except that that’s a long tail, and there’s some barring on the back. But what I saw was a tail vigorously pumping up and down. Classic Kestrel behavior when perched. Its fellow falcons, the Merlins (a bird we usually see during migration) and the Peregrines (resident, but twice as big) don’t do this.

Marion’s raptor may remain a mystery. My friend Nate summed up the situation nicely, “Forget it, Matthew — it’s Chinatown.”

But certainly keeping ears and eyes open will reveal the most amazing things, even in one of the most densely populated, under-parked parts of the metropolis.