12/4/2023 0 Comments Kite birds texsThey fly with a dihedral just like turkey vultures, but the adults can be distinguished from vultures by the black “3” under their tail, and both juveniles and adults have fine barring on the feathers, and yellow cere. ![]() Zone-tailed Hawk: These hawks look very much like vultures. They’ll sometimes stack themselves three high. Since these are birds of flat scrubland, that extra foot or two of elevation can mean the difference between a successful meal or a hungry evening. Though I have yet to personally witness it, Harris’s hawks will occasionally exhibit the unusual behavior of stacking, or literally piling on top of one another, in order to gain altitude and locate prey. One with a smaller bill feeds on the smaller snails, and one with a bigger bill feeds on the bigger snails! In Mexico, where there are two different types of land snails, there are two separate variations of this species of bird. Their bill is specially designed to extract snails from their shells. They are incredibly unique as they spend most of their time climbing around in trees to find the snails, but are sometimes seen flying to their feeding site in the morning and flying back to their roost site in the early evening. There has been a group of five of them seen occasionally at Mission Nature Park lately. Hook-billed Kite: Land snails are this hawk’s exclusive food source. Here’s my pick of the funkiest predators around: Amidst my daydreaming, I got to thinking, some of our Rio Grande Valley hawks are pretty dang cool. ![]() ![]() As fellow Nemesis Birder Alex Lamoreaux was out looking for one of his nemesis birds today, I was sitting in my office a few miles away, pining to also be on the Mission Nature Park levee, scanning the skies for the local group of Hook-billed Kites which have been rather faithfully putting on a show for any interested birders who came to watch for the past several months.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |