From 4-27 April 2013, I visited the Pembina Valley Hawk Watch near Windygates, Manitoba. This is perhaps the premier place to see Red-tails in spring on the entire continent. Although over 12,000 Red-tails were counted for the season by the official counter (Al Schritt and others), only 9755 were counted during the days that I was present, and I estimated that I was able to see roughly 8065 of them. Although the counters had previously only kept track of dark and light Red-tails, I discovered that an amazing number of Harlan’s move through this region, probably more than any other hawk watch south of Alaska.

I was able to see 560 dark Red-tails, of which 260 were Harlan’s (B. j. harlani) and 214 were rufous/dark Westerns (B. j. calurus), plus an additional 15 that showed characteristics of both Harlan’s and Eastern or Western (based on photos), and another 71 that could not be determined to subspecies in the field and were not photographed. The most difficult birds to classify were often the darkest ones, especially since they were almost always only seen from below. Truly dark Westerns (i.e., lacking an obvious rufous breast) were relatively rare (perhaps only 8 or so seen). Of the 260 dark Harlan’s, I recorded 223 of them as showing some sort of white necklace,, another 26 being essentially all black on the underparts, and 11 of which were more intermediate between light and dark morphs with extensive white streaking on the underparts (but still classified as dark morph). An additional 43 light morph Harlan’s were seen, for a total of 303 individual Harlan’s! (43 light morph and 260 dark morph). When I left the site on 27 April, I had seen very few juvenile Red-tails (only 3 juvenile Harlan’s were seen). Also of interest were approximately 25 Krider’s, at least 13 Krider’s intergrades (presumably with Eastern), and another 8 light morph intergrades that I could not classify (Harlan’s or Krider’s or Eastern).

These galleries show a sample of these Red-tails, with each photo showing a different individual.