Santa Cruz Flats Sunday

These spectacular autumn days cry out for a road trip, so Darlene and Gellert and I headed north, down the Santa Cruz, in search of raptors and upland shorebirds. No Mountain Plovers–yet–but it was a surprisingly productive day for winter hawks.

Falcons are always good out on the flats, and today we found numerous American Kestrels, an adult Peregrine Falcon, and three Prairie Falcons.

It’s a tough life for the Vesper Sparrows, Horned Larks, and Lark Buntings that winter out there.

Northern Harriers were already present in good numbers, including a single silver male. One of the scarcest and consequently most sought-after Flats winterers, a White-tailed Kite surprised us at Red Rock on our return.

The season’s first Ferruginous Hawk was this pole-perched beauty just north of Marana.

These magnificent birds will become more common–but never common–over the next few weeks, as numbers of Red-tailed Hawks increase too. This afternoon, we found a dramatic black adult and three intermediate-morph birds among our Red-tails.

The great prize among the buteos, though, is this bird, Harlan’s Hawk.

Rare at best in the state, this boldly marked juvenile Harlan’s was a pleasant surprise on a warm fall’s afternoon. If recent experience has any predictive force, we’re likely to see a few more of these wild visitors from Alaska over the course of the coming winter, but Harlan’s is never expected and always greatly appreciated when it drifts southwest to grace the agricultural fields of southeast Arizona.