Gray Hawk

One of the many highlights of my Southwest Wings tour this week was the chance to see Gray Hawks at several different sites in that species’ restricted US range. By my tally, we saw an adult on a wire east of Nogales, two or three adults and a juvenile at Tubac, an adult at Peña Blanca Lake, and this motley beauty on Ruby Road on our way to the Five-striped Sparrow matinee in California Gulch.

With a juvenile tail and head and adult-like barring on much of the underparts, this is a bird undergoing its slow second pre-basic molt. What interested us–apart from the sheer beauty of the creature–was that Wheeler describes that molt as beginning on the head, while here it is clearly the head, the tail, and some of the wing coverts that are “retarded” in comparison with the body plumage. Is this an aberration, or is the prebasic molt in this tropical species so protracted as to be this variable?