With just a few days left in 2024, the undisputed bird of the year for Cape Cod was found in Chatham. Well, I suppose that flamingo in Dennis, the one that made national and even international news, was the actual undisputed bird of the year, but this bird found Sunday could eat the flamingo, so I’m handing it the trophy. Plus, it’s sort of like when movies purposely released closer to date of the Oscars tend to win – their fresher in your memory. Like the flamingo, yesterday’s monumental find was a first ever record for Massachusetts. It’s a big, uncommon, western hawk you may never have heard of, the formidable Ferruginous Hawk. Even weirder, this was a rare dark morph, as opposed to the much more common light morph.
You could be forgiven for passing off a Ferruginous Hawk as our common, local Red-tailed Hawk – the light morph has the same basic plumage and even a vaguely red tail, and both species have a similar dark morph. This may partly explain the lack of records in the east – even birders struggle with hawk identification. In fact, the discoverer of this Chatham bird initially identified it as a dark morph of a western subspecies of Red-tailed Hawk, but luckily submitted photos and the true, and much more exciting identity was revealed. But there are differences, including the longer, more pointed wings of the Ferruginous. The Ferruginous Hawk is like a cross between an eagle and a hawk – it’s big, for one, with an especially big head and beak, and its long legs are feathered all the way to the feet, like an eagle – hawks have bare lower legs.
Another feature they share with true eagles, and one I have always found striking, at least with close views, is the – bear with me here – lips. “Surely you jest, you ornithological jokester you”, I assume you are saying. But I never joke about bird lips. If you don’t believe me, hit up the web version of this week’s report for this photo of an eagle’s lips. The needlessly technical ornithological term for this part of the beak is the gape, which is a hopelessly stupid and confusing term because it’s visible when the beak is closed, not open and gaping. Let’s go with lips. In any case, true eagles and Ferruginous Hawks have these visible lips extending along the side of the face from the closed beak, most hawks don’t.
I’ve seen very few Ferruginous Hawks, even during my years of working and traveling around the west. I last saw them over 20 years ago in the Sulphur Springs Valley of southeast Arizona, where in winter they love to stand around on the ground in big pivot-irrigated agricultural fields looking for rodents. They are bird of the big treeless spaces of the west, especially places with prairie dogs and other ground squirrels. They will use nesting platforms similar to the Osprey poles we build around here – conservation orgs pitch them to ranchers as a way to control ground squirrels on their land. They’ve have always been one of my favorite hawks – I’ve loved their look and even their name, since I was a kid, as well as the idea of their exotic, to me, haunts on the Great Plains.
If it stays, birders will be coming from all over the northeast to look for this hawk, filling the parking spaces at Morris Island like was mid-August – some are likely en route as you are listening. It will be especially popular if it stays into January, when birders so inclined to keep “year lists” start chasing new birds.
Whether you chase birds, or don’t chase birds, I hope you’ll resolve to just pay more attention to birds and other wildlife in 2025 – perhaps no living things are more available for you to appreciate in your daily life than birds. So skip the short-lived gym membership, and invest in some good binoculars instead – you’re way more likely to stick with that resolution anyway.
