I tried to post this earlier today, but it doesn’t show up on the Yahoo site
and it never came back as an email. So here goes:

Now that the ice has abated, I’ve been able to get back on the greenbelt.
And despite the construction between Esther Simplot and Veterans Parks, Bald
Eagles have been a near daily occurrence.

But today the real treat was an almost totally black hawk near the Willow
Lane bike park. When we first saw him, his red tail was not visible, and I
started thinking that we had something really unusual. But once he flew and
I could see his red tail, I thought it had to be a Harlan’s. And while I’ve
seen Harlan’s before, I’ve never seen a bird so uniformly black/chocolate.
His beak and legs were quite a contrasting yellow against the darkness of
his body, and even the red tail was a muted dark red.

When I got home and looked at Crossley, all the Harlan’s they pictured had
too much white mottling, but Sibley’s had the exact bird (lower right on
page 122 of the 2000 edition), except even Sibley’s picture isn’t as densely
dark as this bird. Sibley does not classify this bird as a Harlan’s, rather
it is just listed as a variation of a Red-tail. Either way, it’s quite a
striking bird!

Tom McCabe, Boise