A northern Utah photographer and birder, Dennis Coleman, was out on a walk this past Wednesday at Farmington Bay WMA in Davis County, Utah. He noticed a hawk and captured some images.
Click here to see his images. Dennis was unsure of the identity of the hawk so he shared the images on UBIRD, one of Utah's birding listservs. It turned out that he had found and photographed a juvenile Common Black-Hawk.
We have a few nesting pairs of Black-Hawks in extreme southwest Utah during the spring and summer breeding season, but that is several hundred miles south of Farmington Bay WMA. Breeding season has passed and the Black-Hawks should be on their way to or already hunting in Mexico. That is a very long way from northern Utah. We had a hawk that had gone way astray and I'm a nut for raptors. I went to bed questioning whether I should try to relocate the hawk in the morning.
I usually commute to work from Utah County to Salt Lake City, but I decided to drive myself Thursday so I could attempt to relocate the Black-Hawk. I didn't have much time and soon realized the odds were against me as I tried to figure out how to get to the location where Dennis had seen the hawk. I had taken a frontage road running along the west side of Legacy Highway thinking it would take me far enough north to get to where Dennis reported the hawk. Unfortunately, the road forward ended and I was quite shy of the desired location. I didn't want to have to double back, get on the highway and head farther north again. I was giving up and heading to work when I was fortunate enough to relocate the hawk several miles south of where Dennis had seen it. I had made what I thought was a dumb mistake, but it was by dumb luck, as often happens, that I relocated the hawk. I quickly sent out a rare bird alert to the local birding listservs so others would have a chance to see the hawk. I also texted and left a message for Jerry Liguori, Jerry is the author of multiple books and countless publications about raptor identification. In fact, if you've read this far, you should visit his website by
clicking here. He also contributes regularly to the blog for
Hawkwatch International. We are fortunate to have him living in the Salt Lake area.
I waited for a few other birders to arrive on the scene so I could hand off the bird's location. I wanted to make it easy for others to locate and observe it. Jerry Liguori was on the scene and observing the bird when I left for work. Shortly after I left the hawk flew east across Legacy Highway and then in a southward direction. It disappeared from the view of a group of birders and it hasn't been seen again since. I have a feeling we may hear about it again.
If it wasn't the cloud cover it was the distance that worked against getting crisp images with my 400mm lens. However, I captured images that provide adequate documentation. The striking facial pattern, bulky secondary feathers, dark malar marks, streaked belly, long legs, finely barred underwings, and white tail with wavy banding are visible in the images below. There were no bands on the bird's legs. It is not one of the banded juvenile hybrids resulting from the breeding of a Red-shouldered Hawk with a Common Black-Hawk in Sonoma County, California.
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| Way-out-of-range Juvenile Common Black-Hawk in Woods Cross, UT |
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| Way-out-of-range Juvenile Common Black-Hawk in Woods Cross, UT |
The lines in the images below are actually guy wires from towering antennas in the open fields behind where the bird was hanging hanging out and making short flights.
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| Way-out-of-range Juvenile Common Black-Hawk in Woods Cross, UT |
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| Way-out-of-range Juvenile Common Black-Hawk in Woods Cross, UT |
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| Way-out-of-range Juvenile Common Black-Hawk in Woods Cross, UT |
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| Way-out-of-range Juvenile Common Black-Hawk in Woods Cross, UT |
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