Burlington County Fairgrounds 12/23--Rough-legged Hawk

Rough-legged Hawk

My "go to" spot for Rough-legged Hawk is the Burlington County Fairgrounds--otherwise known by its mouthful eBird designation as "BC Fairgrounds/Barker's Brook NRA (old Mercer Sod Farm)." It's the spot where Shari & I got our lifer Rough-legged and, because it is one of the few remaining grasslands in the area, a generally good spot for raptors. It can be a frustrating area to bird because you can't actually go in to the grasslands (supposedly to protect the Bald Eagles nesting there), but instead must walk along the railing of the parking lot, scanning and scoping. Hawks aren't hard to find, but the smaller birds can be a chore--I know there are Eastern Meadowlarks there but managed to only see one flying today.

When I got there this morning my strategy was to set up the scope in a few areas as I drove and walked the length of the parking lot. I managed the two eagles almost immediately and Northern Harriers were up and about but scanning the tree line for a soaring hawk only netted me a kettle of vultures.

I walked around the misnamed "Meadow Habitat" which is actually an artificial wetlands without coming up with anything and then walked to the railing, put up my binoculars and saw a large hawk sitting in the grass. "Naturally," I said to myself and speed-walked the football field distance to my car and scope. When I got the scope on the bird it did prove to be the Rough-legged but my digiscope photos weren't even worthy of the noun "documentation."

But, having ticked off the hawk, I walked along the railing up to Rt 206, looking for passerines and finding just starlings. Scanning with the binoculars I saw a hawk in a low tree. "Figures," I said to myself, took a couple of photos with the camera lens on full zoom and scurried the two football fields back to the car and drove back up. With my scope I got very good looks at the bird, and even managed a digiscope photo that showed the bird pretty well:

Okay, maybe not that well, but you can see that it is a light morph with a whitish head and black patch near the eye. I was just about ready to pack it in when I saw a couple of cars coming up. Burlco birders. I put them on the hawk and then a few more birders came along and we admired the bird for a while, looked away, and it was gone. Someone found it hovering and when it returned to the tree we all got excellent looks at its black "wrist" patches as well as the white underwings. When a meadowlark flew I took it as a signal to head out. Late December and still getting year birds.

I'm hoping all these rarities this month (this hawk, the Trumpeter Swans that returned to Assunpink, the Sandhill Cranes in Pemberton, the Ash-throated Flycatcher) all hang around for the new year so that on January 2nd I can spend the day driving around and ticking them off, because, as my friend Bob Auster likes to point out, you have to get your rarities early if you want to build up a big year list.