Frank Taylor just sent me last weekend's banding report from his hawk trapping station in northern Minnesota. While I was busy with birding in Cape May, NJ over the weekend, he was dealing with goshawks and a double red-tailed hawk capture! So wish I had not been working and had been at the blind with him. I just love this photo! This is a red-tailed hawk getting ready to fly into the nets. But look at the great light the hawk is flying in, the sun is hitting some dark clouds in the distance and the vegetation has browns, yellows, whites and green to make a late autumn look--three of my favorite things all in one shot! You'll note I have a similar theme on my banner on the blog. That's how I imagine heaven will be (that and all the angels look like Daniel Craig).

Because Frank bands on the weekends and not during the week, the station is dependent on winds coming out of the northwest just on the weekends to get good numbers of migrating raptors moving through. The weather mojo hasn't been really been that cooperative this year, so most of the weekends have been slow going. Ah well, some years that's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.

Although Saturday Frank said, "Not much was moving in the morning and our first bird of the day was a huge second year adult female Goshawk that came in at 11:40 am." Check out how big that girl is! That's Chuck and Rick holding her. She's HUGE. She's no doubt female (in the raptor world females are larger than males and it's more noticeable in bird eating raptors like goshawks).

Frank noted that she's a second year bird, meaning she hatched in 2007. She's got her adult gray feathers, but her eyes are still quite yellow. The older these accipiters get (accipiters are a type of hawk that includes sharp-shinned hawks and Cooper's hawks), the more red their eyes become. Here's a photo I took a few years ago of an adult gos with those red eyes:

That red with that delicate gray makes them the most beautiful raptor (in the US) in my book. It also makes them look more maniacal.

They did get a passage (hatched this year) goshawk too--note the brown feathers and yellow eyes. Ug, this is so painful. I love Cape May and I loved birding and I got some fabulous digiscoping images (I still have a few more to post) but I love goshawks so much, I'm so sorry I missed this weekend at Frank's station. And as awesome as goshawks are, they also had some other excitement in the nets:

"A lot of birds started moving. First the Crows got up, followed by the Eagles and Ravens, then an explosion of adult Red-tails with some Rough-legs and Shins mixed in. At various times during the day, we could see as many as thirty birds in the air at once. What a day!!! A lot of the Red-tails would swoop in and perch in the trees over the blinds. We had to go out and shoo them away so they wouldn't scare off any of the others that were making their final approach to the nets."

The highlight of the day came when we got a double of adult Red-tails at 3:35 pm. When they hit, Rick shot out past the one in the front net knowing it was securely caught and grabbed the one in the mist net that was all but out, except for its feet!!! Chuck got on the other one right away. WAY TO GO, GUYS!!!! That was the first time we ever got a double on larger hawks. (We did get a triple on Shins once a few years back.)"