Sharp-shinned Hawk

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

A juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus) wafts overhead. Given its tiny size, the bird is almost certainly a male. Indeed, when I spotted it far out, my first thought was American Kestrel. The utterly different shape and flight style quickly dispelled that thought, and to my pleasure the little raptor, seemingly curious about us ground-bound people, floated low over our heads affixing us with a stare that you would never want to see if you were a small songbird.

Little birds are the Sharp-shinned Hawk's bread and butter and they're adept at catching them, displaying extreme aerial prowess when doing so. Hyper-aggressive with big personalities, "sharpies" are legendary for their badgering of much larger raptors such as Red-tailed Hawks. A Sharp-shinned Hawk is like Mike Tyson, Genghis Khan, and Wayne Gretzky rolled into a feathered ball of testosterone. Males are up to a third smaller than females, and the girls aren't so big either. On occasion I've lucked into a perched male Sharp-shinned Hawk - they'll often lurk quietly on a limb near a tree trunk or some other hiding spot when hunting - and the bird looks no bigger than a Blue Jay.

This bird appeared while I was with a group of people watching a vagrant Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus) in Licking County, Ohio, not far east of Columbus. The flycatcher - one of relatively few Ohio records - was a stunning adult with incredibly long tail streamers. While great looks were had, the bird never came close enough for photos. Missing the shot of the rarity is at best only a semi-bummer for me. I was watching birds hardcore LONG before I began photographing them and must confess that sometimes I still get so entranced by watching them I forget to take the photo! And at this site, a constant stream of Blue Jays passed back and forth overhead, carrying acorns on the return trip. I managed some pretty nice images of the feathered mast-toters and will make a post about that eventually. As I was all set up for birds-in-flight photography, when the Sharp-shinned Hawk decided to float over, it was an easy matter to capture him on pixels.

PHOTO NOTE: I shot this image with my workhorse Canon 800mm f/5.6 atop a Wemberly head on a Gitzo tripod. The body was Canon's remarkable R5 mirrorless camera. I've got that camera set up so that all three back buttons serve as focus buttons: rightmost is a single point, center button is all points on the central (of three) zone, and the leftmost button is all points active. When it's a lone bird in the sky, the camera instantly grabs and holds the subject, often pasting the active focus point or points right on the bird's face. It almost feels like cheating. Settings were f/9, 1/4000, ISO 2500 and +0.7 exposure compensation. In hindsight I would have backed off to f/8 and dropped the shutter speed to about 1/2000, which would have been plenty fast enough given the hawk's languid flight. This would have dropped the ISO significantly, but the R5 handles higher ISO's well and as the bird was close enough that huge cropping was unnecessary, the image is easy to work with and still looks good. Sometimes, in the heat of an exciting moment, I forget to keep tabs on those settings!

Hawk attempts to punk bigger hawk

Gorgeous fall foliage along the long entrance drive to Triangle Lake Bog State Nature Preserve, Portage County, Ohio.

Last Saturday evening, I was the invited speaker for the The Native Plant Society of Northeastern Ohio's annual soiree, which was held at the Pine Lake Trout Club near Chagrin Falls. That was a great time and I appreciate the group's hospitality.

Not one to miss an opportunity, I headed up that way a bit early, and arrived at the aforementioned preserve near Ravenna well before the sun rose.

A 1/2 mile or so of planking makes access to the bog easy. And I can tell you, were it not for this boardwalk, one would truly be bog-stomping. The place is essentially a massive sponge, and the possibility of stepping through the mat and into water much deeper than expected would be an ever-present risk.

Years ago, Greg Schneider and I waded all through this place, seeking a tiny aquatic carnivorous plant known as Two-scaped Bladderwort, Utricularia geminiscapa. It had never been recorded in Ohio, but we figured it might occur at this place. And we found it, growing in small pools on sections of the bog mat that bounced like a trampoline. It was truly tough going, and it's probably a minor miracle that neither of us fell through the mat, to be unearthed centuries later as "bog mummies".

Capturing the beauty of the bog at first light was my primary mission. To step into this place is to be transported hundreds of miles to the north, where glacial kettle lake bogs are still common. They once were in northeastern Ohio, too, but most have long succumbed to the forces of vegetative succession.

A largely undisturbed oasis like Triangle Lake is full of interesting flora and fauna. I wasn't out of my car in the parking lot before I heard the mellow chuck-chuck notes of Hermit Thrushes. Kinglets of both species worked the shrubbery, and Yellow-rumped Warblers were everywhere. Cedar Waxing flocks darted about and woodpeckers of six species made themselves known. At one point, a Northern Flicker dropped into a berry-laden Poison Sumac treelet eight feet from my position, and began scarfing down fruit while eyeing me with some suspicion.

Not long after daybreak, one of the local Red-tailed Hawks took to the air, and it was in sight as much as not for the remainder of my time, tracing lazy circles overhead. After the golden light of dawn had passed, I returned to the car and got my telephoto lens, found a semi-hidden vantage point and began to work the birds.

Early on, I had noticed a Sharp-shinned Hawk that rose on the thermals and would reappear from time to time. Judging by its behavior, I figured it, like the red-tail, was the product of local breeders. Well, as luck would have it, I was drawing a photographic bead on the red-tailed when suddenly the "sharpie" came in towards the larger hawk at speed.

If you're not wise to the ways of Sharp-shinned Hawks, they are feathered bundles of testosterone - one of the most aggressive birds there is. They love to attack and strafe larger birds, especially other raptors. The sharpie in these photos is a young female, and she's about one-third larger than a male would be, the latter being not much larger than a Blue Jay. Nonetheless, she is dwarfed by the red-tail, which outmasses her by 5-6 times.

The little hawk made a few half-hearted strafes of the larger bird, but wasn't as persistently aggressive as I've seen them be. I figured that if both were the spawn of local breeders, they were pretty used to each other by now. This is probably the two hundredth play-fight the poor red-tail has probably had to endure from the crazy little raptor. You can almost see it rolling its eyes and thinking "great! this little jerk again!"

After a few passes, the sharpie angled off to wreak havoc elsewhere. But I certainly appreciated the show.

Sharp-shinned Hawk

Today was the always interesting Beaver Christmas Bird Count, which covers a very rural section of Jackson County in southeastern Ohio. I've been covering the same tract within this count for a decade or more, and today I had the good fortune of having Nina Harfmann and Heather Aubke along. We had a blast, saw lots of birds, and even some noteworthy plants. More on those later, perhaps.

At one point, Heather spotted a small raptor winging over a gap in the forest. We quickly glanced up to see a gorgeous adult Sharp-shinned Hawk, Accipiter striatus, tracing rapid circles. Note I did not say "languid" circles, as I might if the bird were a buteo such as a Red-shouldered Hawk. There is nothing even remotely languid about one of these little death-dealers.

This bird was almost certainly a male, as it was tiny. I managed to lunge skyward with the camera and manage this one OK shot. Note the bird's nicely squared off tail. In life, much more was evident that painted the raptor as a "sharpie": tiny size, rapid, almost frantic wingbeats, elfin head and bill.

I was delighted by this find, as sharpies are easy to miss. And although I think that the 112 years of Christmas Bird Count data is a veritable goldmine of avian information, and much of it is of great use, I am very distrustful of Sharp-shinned Hawk records. Many of them, I am confident, are misidentified Cooper's Hawks. And to a lesser extent, Cooper's Hawks which are actually sharpies.

Anyway, Sharp-shinned Hawks are 220 pounds of Mike Tyson at his prime packaged in Tiny Tim's frame. They're psychotic bundles of testosterone; full of vim and vinegar. No songbird is safe around one. The sharpie is without doubt one of my favorite birds, and it was a pleasure to see one today.

I'm too tired this evening to write more, but HERE IS A LINK to a previous posting about these little toughs.

Psychotic Homicidal Beast Friday

I saw a Sharp-shinned Hawk the other day, tracing lazy, languid circles high in the sky. A migrant, the "sharpie" was off to parts north, and this is about as placid as you'll ever see one of these birds behaving.

This got me thinking about "Sky Watch Friday". A lovely bit of goodness, this site allows photographers to post beautiful images of fluffy clouds, tantalizing sunsets, and other awe-inspiring views of the ether.

Very nice.

But there are winged savages up there in the sky, like the above Sharp-shinned Hawk. If these feathered balls of testosterone were the size of Trumpeter Swans, we'd all be dead. They'd run us down, pluck off our extremities, and feast on our innards. The sharpie is a fitting subject for Psychotic Homicidal Beast Friday, a blogger's tribute to the week's end that is very unlikely to catch on.

Sharp-shinneds like to attack things. They seem to be utterly devoid of fear. In migration, they'll routinely strafe larger, more sluggish and mellower co-migrants like Red-tailed Hawks, just for kicks, apparently. Yes, if these boys were human, they'd be stored in rubber rooms and fed through slots.


All of the Accipiter tribe are hostile. These are the bird hawks, equipped with long rudderlike tails to facilitate quick jigs and jags, and short rounded wings, the better to accelerate in fast bursts and get through dense thickets. No songbird is safe with lurking accipters nearby.

The above silhouette is a cardinal's Grim Reaper come to life; the spector of death for small birds. A Cooper's Hawk, the bigger relative of the sharpies and every bit as aggressive. They are like Mike Tyson, Wayne Gretzky, and Ghengis Khan rolled into one: savage aggression, suberb agility, and cunning warrior skills. I have seen coops go so far as to run on foot into shrubby thickets where songbirds cowered and the vegetation was too dense to fly into. That'd be like your worst dream come true, if you were the House Sparrow in the shrub.

I photographed the above confrontation a while back. Cooper's (left) meets Sharp-shinned (right). They didn't like each other. It was a battle of Alpha versus Alpha, as the little sharpie badgered the bigger coop, who would then chase his tormentor. Kind of like two bigtime wrestlers, maybe Stone Cold Steve Austin going after Andre the Giant.

Don't get me wrong. I love these birds, and admire everything about them. A group of us stumbled across the above Sharp-shinned Hawk, just after it had killed a Brown-headed Cowbird, last year. Like an unrepentant street thug, it gave us the evil eye for daring to intrude, and held its turf. These birds really aren't intimidated by much.

It was very apropos that Attila the Hun bedecked his war helmet with the likeness of a Northern Goshawk, the largest and most savage Accipiter of them all.

If you want to learn more about raptors, or even if you don't but do want to attend a fun birding event, come to Lake Erie Wing Watch. Held on Saturday, April 4th in Port Clinton, there'll be plenty of interesting talks, capped by keynote Chuck Hagner speaking about Kirtland's Warblers. I'll be giving a program on raptors, and there'll be talks on waterfowl, bird song, shorebirds, photography, and more. Register HERE!