We
visited Mingo National Wildlife Refuge in southern Missouri last
week on two separate days. It is a beautifully diverse refuge with
bogs, marshes, fields and forests. We drove the 17 mile wildlife
drive through hills, fields and forests and I was going about
twenty-five miles an hour when I spotted this lovely falcon (hint:=)
out of the corner of my eye. Luckily, he didn't fly immediately even
though I had to back up in order to see him. He flew across the
road and as you can hear in the video. I had to lay across Mrs.
Sutherland to get the shot out her window.
This
bird can be found in most countries in the northern hemisphere. Most ornithologists think that the European birds are a separate species.
I have included a still shot of another one that we saw feeding on a
fence post in Montana. Good luck with what I think will be an
easy ID. The list is growing and I intend to bring it up to date with
the next post this week. I added bird 200 today! We were pretty busy last week and did not
always have internet. Happy birding.
AHHH we don't know... We can't decide if it is the Merlin or the Prairie Falcon!
ReplyDeleteI can see why this could pose a problem there are a lot of similarities. One tool for determining an ID is size and this is not available to you because it is difficult to determine the size of this bird in the video. This is a fairly small falcon. Another ID tool is the range map. When I question the ID of a bird I often check first to see if it ranges in the area. This is not 100% reliable because birds have wings and sometimes show up where they do not belong but this would be rare so it remains a solid tool. If you check what I said in the text about this bird, It ranges over all of North America as well as Europe. One of these birds only ranges in the western half of North America and it does not range in Missouri.
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