The raptors of the meadows generally ignore trees.
After entertaining flocks of people, the snowy owl in Deerfield has disappeared, but other raptors have been haunting the meadows in the Pioneer Valley. Like the snowy owl, these hunters are rare visitors from the North. The rough-legged hawk is one such tundra dweller being found in our region. It gets its name from the heavy feathering on its legs.
You may have read in a recent column how we saw a rough-legged hawk hunting a meadow in Vermont. Though we could see thousands of snow geese flying and feeding on one side of the road, this “roughleg” was drawing equal interest on the other side. As glorious as the geese were, we could not ignore this special raptor.
The roughleg is a member of the soaring family of raptors known as buteos. Three other buteos breed in New England, and are common. They are slow moving birds that usually hunt from a perch. The rough-legged hawk hunts on the wing, thanks to its ability to hover and glide gradually over marsh and meadow.
It is also unusual in another way; it comes in two colors or “morphs”, light and dark. When perched, the light morph bird shows a mostly white head and chest, while the dark morph bird is entirely black. Seen in flight overhead, the dark morph bird shows some white in the wings and tail, but its dark body and wing linings make it decidedly more handsome.
The light morph is more common here, but the roughlegs recently found this winter in Deerfield and in the Hadley-Northampton meadows have been dark morphs. Such a black buteo is worth making a special effort to see whenever it appears.
The short-eared owl is also a bird of the tundra and northern marshes. It is smaller than the snowy owl, with long, narrow wings that enable it to float slowly over field and marsh in search of prey. A single bird has been found in Deerfield, but as many as four short-eared owls have been present in Hadley and Northampton.
These owls do not usually hunt in full daylight. They prefer dusk or dawn for their forays. Three weeks ago we tried to find them in the Hadley meadows, but the wind was whipping so hard that they stayed hidden in slumber. We plan to try again.
The raptors of the meadows generally ignore trees, especially the snowy owl, which is found on the ground, or on a building or post, never on that odd, unfamiliar structure, the tree. There are songbirds that have such an aversion as well.
Raptors almost always fly solo, but the songbirds of the winter meadows fly in flocks, sometimes in very large numbers. The most common species is the horned lark, named for the peculiar tuft of tiny black feathers that protrude from the back of its head.
A hundred larks can undulate across the meadows, their faint and delicate whistles falling in their wake. Then they themselves fall at once and are gone, their pale, dirt gray bodies now seeming part of the dirt itself. If you are close enough, and scan hard enough, you may see the black patch on their faces as they scuttle across the silent field.
With them may be the longed for Lapland longspur, a bird from Baffin Island, the Yukon, or Alaska. They have flown as far to reach our climes as a warbler flies to reach the tropics. It is a beautiful bird when breeding, but when they reach their winter home, they are just another brown streaked sparrow.
Usually we search many days to find a handful of longspurs on the winter meadows. This year some longspurs have almost always been with the flocks of larks and buntings. Their numbers will never reach a hundred, but this winter a quarter of that has been counted.
Did someone say “buntings?” We started with the snowy owl and now finish with the snow bunting. Almost every visitor to the meadows this year has witnessed these feathered snowflakes, a flying blanket of white birds whirling over the ground.
This year a hundred birds in a flock have been common, but twice and three times that many have sometimes been seen, an eye-popping sight indeed. Visit the meadows soon, before you miss the panoply of tundra birds, from owls to buntings.
Seth Kellogg can be contacted at skhawk@comcast.net
The Allen Bird Club website can be found at massbird.org/allen