Rough-legged Hawk

Haldimand County. ON. December 27 2022. The farmland where I had enjoyed watching a couple of Northern Harriers six weeks ago is a clay plain, the left-overs an ancient glacial lake.  It is wide and flat, criss-crossed by a grid of long straight roads: hot and dreamy in August, windswept and cold in January. I went back there today, wanting to see if the harriers were still around in this snow-drifted landscape.

A century or more ago, European settlers, through their land surveyors, were rectangularly methodical in dividing up this new-to-them land. It was parcelled up into townships, concessions and lots with provision for roads in between. Sometimes, where the work of two surveyors met, a clash of straight-line geometry resulted, with roads and fence-lines colliding and bouncing off each other at angles, obtuse and acute.

I was in one of these geometrically-muddled corners and driving slowly along quiet country roads, on the lookout for a harrier.  I drove beneath a large bird perched nervously on top of an old utility pole and assumed it to be a Red-tailed Hawk. I was wrong. About an hour later I had circled around, as much inadvertently as intentionally, when I saw this same large bird but now in flight. This was not a Red-tailed but a Rough-legged Hawk, a horse of quite a different colour – to mix metaphors.

Rough-legged Hawks are an Arctic species with a breeding distribution across the taiga and tundra of the Old and New Worlds. The Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas of 2001-2005 concluded there were fewer than five breeding pairs in the vastness of Ontario.  It is an uncommon winter visitor here, but happily for us birders it seems to like this wide-open country.  It is a treat and a privilege to see one.

I pulled to one side, carefully because sometimes where gravel becomes grass, grass become snow and snow becomes an unseen ditch.  Safe and settled, I soon realized that a Northern Harrier had shown up and was coursing the fields: skimming low on light bouncy wing-strokes, sometimes turning abruptly to drop into the deeper grass for a catch. Meanwhile the Rough-legged Hawk had settled on the top of a lone tree. I watched and admired both for a long time and was lucky enough to get perhaps my best-ever photos of the hawk.

There were other nice birds today including: a small flock of Wild Turkeys, a large flock of Snow Buntings and a solitary adult Bald Eagle. While they all deserve a bit more than footnote status, that’s all they get because the Rough-legged Hawk was unquestionably my Bird of the Day.