The Wandering Naturalist: N Goshawk

Thursday, January 3, 2008

Northern Goshawk!

Yesterday evening, I IDed a N Goshawk over on Cty OO near the middle school (mom found it for me)
It was clearly an Accipiter with a long tail and dark bluey-black back. The chest was grey rather than the reddish color of an adult cooper's or sharpie. You could also just barely make out the white supercilium of an Adult N Goshawk.

I'm glad I got that one out of the way. Goshawks are tricky to find at best. Especially around here and I'm not foreseeing any future trips to the northern rockies where they can be found. They are also one of the coolest N American Hawks. This one is the 3rd Goshawk that I have found in Richland County. I've only ever seen 5 of them. The other two being out west. One of them being this year when I was out visiting the Tetons and Yellowstone.

Now, on to the next bird. I still need Snowbuntings, Horned Larks and Lapland Longspurs.

Bird quotes.

"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."

(From William Beebe's "The Bird: Its Form and Function," 1906)

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' (I found it) but 'That's funny...'"
--Isaac Asimov

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
-- Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

"I once had a sparrow alight on my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn." --Henry David Thoreau

"God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages." --Jacques Deval

"Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?" --Rose Kennedy

"No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings" --William Blake

"A wise old owl sat on an oak; The more he saw, the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard; Why aren't we like that wise old bird?" --E.H. Richards

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song" --Maya Angelou

"When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head!" --William Blake

"He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls."

--A.L. Tennyson, "The Eagle"

"This monument, perched like a duckhawk on this cliff, will scan this wide valley, watching through the days and years. For many a March, it will watch the geese go by. For many an April, it will see the redbuds come and go, and for many a May the flush of Oak-blooms on a thousand hills. Questing wood Ducks will search these basswoods for hollow limbs; golden Prothonotaries will shake golden pollen from river willows. Egrets will pose on these sloughs in August; Plovers will whistle from september skies. Hickory nuts will plop into October leaves and hail will rattle November woods. But no pigeons will pass for there are no pigeons, save only this flightless one graven in bronze on this rock.
Tourists will read this inscription but their thoughts will not take wing."
--Aldo Leopold ("on the monument to the pigeon". A Sand county almanac)