Falcon Spotting Right Outside Our Window!

it looks to me like it's a red-tailed hawk. pretty common around these parts, but a gorgeous sight to see nonetheless. raptors are amazing creatures!

seems a bit small for a red tail to me, and the bars on the tail make me think not a red tail.

was its breast white? if it had stripes, i wonder whether it is the cooper's hawk i saw at bbg the other day.

the head seems small for a falcon, but i could be wrong about all this. perhaps someone with more knowledge can pipe up.

no matter which it turns out to be, it's a very cool sighting and a great picture!

i think it's a light morph juvenile (red-tail). those guys have a brown, banded tail. i wish it were a falcon since i don't get the chance to see many of those at all, but the head and body shape of this guy screams "hawk".

cooper's hawks have red eyes, as do adult red-tails. but the juvie red-tails have yellow eyes, which it looks like this bloke has.

great photo, BTW, jesed

sweet tea wrote: i guess the expert had already spoken!

HARDLY!

but i did work at the Bronx Zoo for 18 mos. in the hospital and we spent a lot of time rehabbing local raptors. i spent more than a day or two trying not to lose a finger or eyeball to hawks, owls, and eagles!! part of the reason i love raptors so much is that there is an intelligence working there behind those eyes. with all due respect to pet bird lovers out there, when you look at a budgie and it looks back at you, you can tell that it's either thinking, "gimme food?" or "eat me today?". when you look at a raptor and it looks back at you, you can tell it's thinking, "boy these bipedal primates are rather stupid, but at least this one tries to placate me with food. today, i'll let it live another day."

kind of like cats.

They're fans of perching atop the Library. In the late fall/early winter you can usually spot them either on the roof or in the nearby trees after the leaves fall. Fiance & I saw a gorgeous one last year that swooped down and got a rat. Pretty awesome pest control.