Great adventure today, took a trip and met up with Tony Dvorak in Orange County, New York. We were looking for some special birds and today was a good day!
Mission was to find and photograph a ferruginous hawk that had flooded e-bird with reports. A very rare bird for the northeast. A long and uneventful drive brought us to the back roads of orange county. With names like celery and onion road, I'm sure this gives you an idea of the type of area it was. riding up and down the road scanning the tree line looking for this special hawk.
There were many red tail hawks perched in the trees. We move in different locations and Tony spots the bird and waves me back. I snag some long distance shots to verify our find and add it to the lifer list.
There is also a report that there is a Subarcticus Great Horned Owl at the end of this road in some evergreen trees. Tony checks them a couple of times and then spots the bird tucked in deep in the tree. I set up my camera with a 500mm lens and a 1.7 tc to hopefully get a usable pic.
While not perfect in quality it was a perfect ending for that expedition The bird of the day: ferruginous hawk. Perched way above on a tree scoping the fields looking for prey.
Subarcticus Great Horned Owl-. subarticus is found from E. British Columbia east to the Hudson Bay and south to at least the Northern U. S. the subspecies of the Great Horned Owl, b.v.subarcticus. Like other birds from the Canadian north such as Snowy & Great Grey owls, they occasionally move south in search of food.
Ferruginous Hawks are large Buteo hawks with relatively long wings and large heads. The wings narrow to form more pointed tips than is typical for other buteos Ferruginous Hawks live in the open spaces of the West, in grasslands, prairie, sagebrush steppe, scrubland, and pinyon-juniper woodland edges.
