community.kjrh.com

I don't know if this will help but last year we were driving down the highway and we spotted a hawk on a light post and then it started hopping around on cars in a parking lot every day we saw it on the light post as we were going to work for quite a long time.We followed it on several occasions on the ground and on telephone lines we don't know if this could have been K or J. We spotted it off the B.A expressway & Garnett. I have 3 pictures but I need help on putting them up

hawk88:

I don't know if this will help but last year we were driving down the highway and we spotted a hawk on a light post and then it started hopping around on cars in a parking lot every day we saw it on the light post as we were going to work for quite a long time.We followed it on several occasions on the ground and on telephone lines we don't know if this could have been K or J. We spotted it off the B.A expressway & Garnett. I have 3 pictures but I need help on putting them up

05:56 Oh wow Hawk, how cool. It is very possible. I don't know the area, but some of our Tulsa posters might know if it would be in their territory range.

Get with Catbird and see if she can help you with posting your pictures! If you can't get her through the forum, private message her through the forum. Good Luck. Would love to see the pictures.

---

The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man. ~Author Unknown

I would say  not Kay or Jay as that is about 8-9 miles from the KJRH tower. 
Hopefully it is another successful RTH family!!!  There are plenty of critters around for dinner, especialy in that area as not as heavily developed, more green spaces!!

They are probably hunting the large fields adjacent to the BA near the State Farm building. There are tons of rabbits and field mice out there.

Hawk88: I have e-mailed you. Please do send your photos and I will post them for you. The air is filled with the wings of hawks! EVERYwhere!

Hawk88: I have posted your delightful hawk photos over on the Photos/Screen Captures thread, with all of our other treasures! Thank you for sharing them with us. What fun!

Catbird Thank you for posting for us!

After watching the F1 race, the Indy Car race and the MotoGP on Sunday, I decided to get out and headed over to Langenheim Park to see what I could see.

One of the juveniles showed up a few minutes after I got there pursued and harried by several Blue Jays. He sat on a wooden fence posing for me while I got these shots. The Jays chased him of into the neighborhood until I could hear them no more. Large beautiful bird...

 

I heard the bird a few more times while I wandered about, but never could locate he/she. Looking forward to going back out.

Great pictures.  Juvenile or Adult???   Anybody care to help here?

I think adult.  Maybe Gwen (big feet).

The poster said it was a juvenile, can't tell from the photo, belly band looks kind of narrow for a juve but you know, there are just so many looks these guys have! I need the tail to know for sure...

The belly band does seem narrow for a juvie, but the eye color is quite light.... ???? Would help to see the tail.

These are great pictures! Enjoyed them very much. This is a BIG hawk! As Socal wrote, a good look at the tail would help

---

The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man. ~Author Unknown

I was shooting with a 300mm f4 and 2x teleconverter so my effective zoom was 900mm on my Nikon but the aperture was down to a pretty dim f8, so my shutter speed ended up at 1/200th of a sec. All I got was blurring when he took off. No detail of his tail at all.

According to my bird manual, the belly band is a lot fainter and thinner on our southwestern (fuertesi) birds than those back east (borealis). I think his lightly colored beak marks this as a juvenile as the adult's beak go predominantly dark as they age. Red-Tails have so many morphs and there is not a really set plumage coloration and design. Eastern and western birds do mate where ranges intersect and can offer up many varieties in plumage. If he sticks around the park area it will interesting to note how his plumage changes. I'm afraid though that there are not enough birds and rodents in such a small park to support him for too much longer and the farther he ranges the better hunting might be. I know this, the Blue Jays were looking to get their pound of flesh out of him. He's obviously been hunting them and they don't appreciate it.

It was pretty funny to be watching the park with  the pretty good sized group of robins and mockingbirds foraging in the grass and the occasional squirrel picking about. Everything was calm and the birds were making their usual noise and then I heard his short "kiyeah". Everything in the park stopped, nothing made a sound for about two seconds and then every bird took off squawking and the squirrels hit the trees in a blink of an eye. They know when he's hunting.

kactionphoto: Your photography is wonderful!!... With regard to the color of the beak on this individual bird, it actually looks very similar to Kay and Jay's.... the beak is actually dark in color, but the upper part (somebody please help here on the terminology... sallyls? Catbird?...) is yellow. Have you had the opportunity to view the wonderful archive that KJRH has on the main Hawk page?... Lots of video to have fun watching if you haven't already:

http://www.kjrh.com/content/news/hawks/default.aspx
(Then CLICK ON: "NEW: HAWK'S NEST VIDEO ARCHIVE")

Kevin:

I think the light eyes speak to its being a young bird also. I am told (we are in almost daily contact with the NYC/Manhattan - Pale Male community through Donegal at Palemale Irregulars blogsite) that newly
hatched redtails have dark blue eyes (and over at the Photos/Screen Captures thread, we have pictures showing Thunder 2-3 days post-hatch with dark blue eyes), at fledge
time they have pale, light golden eyes, and by age 3 their eyes are completely dark. This hawk's eyes appear light to me, so that would indicate between fledge age and age 3. IF the eye color is a reliable indicator.

I have never heard of beak color being used but the more clues the merrier! Belly band size and color depth, size of feet, tail-feather color and length and banding, eye color, chin color, beak color - our heads are spinning!

Would you mind also posting copies of your terrific photos (and that is great light you got on the hawk!) and the location, date, time of your sighting over on the Photos and Screen Captures thread?

The recent attention this forum has been getting from scientists and hawk watchers around the country, and our own subsequent (responsive) mapping and logging efforts, is a quite new thing for us, and we are all klutzy with it, but trying, trying, so would you mind terribly please going over to the Observation Thread and copy/post there the date, time, description of the hawk, location, any ancillary information of this sighting.

With entries made on that Observation Thread, we are logging and mapping all sightings of Tulsa's redtailed hawks, not only for us, but it turns out, for our scientific brethren as well. By better "organizing" ourselves , we hope the forum will provide quick and easy access by those members here on the Forum who only visit once a week or so, so they always reliable know which thread to go to to find what they are looking for, where to go to look for sightings and updates, instead of hither and yon through many pages of individual threads.

As to the ancillary information we would love to have provided in postings (since you are clearly going to be one of our highly valued feet-on-the-ground-in-Tulsa members, would include, for example, diet. We have two scientists (raptor biologists) who are following this forum, who are very interested in what the Tulsa red tails are eating and feeding their young (and you have been terrific with supplying information on snakes and other assorted goodies), so diet and any other kinds of information you can provide on habitat, habits, behavior, etc, would also be so very welcome.

We have, as I noted, attracted the attention of scientists from around the country with what this Hawk Forum has documented in its observations and photographs of the Tulsa Hawks - ever since our own Tulsa Hawk Forum Member "Observer" discovered and proved (screen captures) that hawks DO hunt and fly at night (see the Photo/Screen capture thread), and that if a newly fledged redtail CAN get back to its nest, it will, and the more often the better, which you will find documented ad infinitum on the Observation Thread.

The scientific community is used to more organization than we amateurs are, and every single one of us has been caught "off topic" at one time or another, or ten times or another, and I am probably more guilty of being off topic than others...but we are trying to be consistent for the sake of ease of access for members and for science...and we are trying to post our photos, or at least copies of photos, (or links to photos) on the Photo/Capture Thread, and ... trying to keep the sightings and observations and ancillary information copied to the Observation thread, or, better yet, originally posted on the Observation Thread.

It keeps all of us less crazed while we try to find things, and it keeps our cohorts in raptor science, smiling benignly down upon our efforts as they rummage around on our rapidly growing forum for data.

We are all so glad you are here!