Studying for a bird quiz like
hey op, if you want any tips/good tricks for differentiating hawks, feel free to dm me!
Aww, thanks a bunch, but I’m fine! I only needed hawks for this one quiz and am taking the course for fun. Though, my friend is more serious about bird watching so I’ll relay any questions she has, if that’s ok!
Of course! Feel free to pass on any questions! My expertise is in accipitriformes, but I can provide resources for other birds as well
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#hawk talks
good news! its nothing to do with being smart, its a niche part of an already confusing scientific field. taxonomy is a kind of dark magic bullshit
bad news! i am fully willing to explain every aspect of this meme. let me explain accipitriforme taxonomy. you want to let me explain accipitriforme taxonomy so bad
I am making a genuine request for you to explain accipitriforme taxonomy. Share your dark magic bullshit with us
That’s all the encouragement I need!
I’m gonna walk through the meme above as a starting point because otherwise there is a lot to talk about and nowhere clear to start. Feel free to ask for further clarifications because this is now a college lecture class this will be on the test(kidding)
Oh also opinions on taxonomy vary wildly depending on a few different things so if you disagree with anything I say here, feel free to fight me to the death in the taxonomy thunderdome. I understand this is how postdocs like to settle things
First, the taxon in question: Order Accipitriformes. Hawks, Eagles, Kites and Allies. Contains well, the stuff I just listed along with buzzards(not the American understanding of the word, New World Vultures aren’t accipitriformes), Old World Vultures(yeah they are different from NWV), Ospreys, and a few other odds and ends.
Disclaimer one, it does not include falcons or owls. Falcons are parrots who chose violence and I think owls are a kind of sentient beachball. I cannot help with these
Disclaimer two, most of those words(Hawks, eagles, kites, etc) mean nothing. They are honestly more of a visual descriptor than any actual category. You do have stuff like “true eagles”(genus aquila) but that doesn’t include stuff like bald eagles. A Cooper’s Hawk is more closely related to a Northern Harrier than it is to a Red Tailed Hawk. Honey Buzzards are a kind of kite. Just make your peace with all of that now.
Okay back to the meme. First bullet point I thinks is pretty self explanatory with my above explanation. Stop categorizing them they clearly want to make you suffer
Second point: Buteo is a genus that contains a bunch of accipitriformes that are commonly known as hawks(ex red tailed hawk, common buzzard) and has a lot of taxonomic drama, which is partially why I used it for this joke. The other reason is that I’m biased and its one of my favorites.
Third point: Buteogallus is you guessed it another genus of a bunch of accipitriformes(Black Hawks and Allies). Most of them are known as hawks, but the Chaco Eagle and Solitary Eagle are both also in buteogallus, because they hate you. I picked them for this joke because they are relatively closely related to buteos. There are a few that are more closely related to buteos, but the name similarity made it funnier to me. Buteos and the Cooler Buteos
“Initial ID was Nisaetus Cirrhatus but it’s actually Pernis Ptilorhynchus”
If you ever wanted proof that morphological taxonomy is fake, that’s what this is for. The birds mentioned are Changeable Hawk-Eagle and Oriental Honey Buzzard respectively, and often get confused for eachother by people on iNaturalist, so it’s a correction I make semi-often. However, they are pretty far from eachother on the taxon tree(I believe Nisaetus is closer to True Eagles? It recently was shifted around though cuz it was split off from Spizaetus so don’t quote me).
Changeable Hawk-Eagle, Oriental Honey Buzzard
“Frameworks and binoculars” This joke was just me dunking on birders. I have no idea how often actual taxonomists use binoculars. I’m an engineer
The images:
A tree???: This is a taxon tree showing the updated position of Booted Eagles relative to other eagles based on a recent genetic study. I think I chose this one in specific because it was the only one out of the ones I have saved that fit in the slot. Yes I have multiple accipitriforme taxon trees saved don’t worry about it
Range Overlap Hell: This image shows the complete range distribution of the Common Buzzard(buteo buteo)(also known as the steppe buzzard)(also known as motherfucker who makes my life harder). It’s called range overlap hell because, well, it overlaps with a lot of very similar looking birds, and makes it a pain to ID everyone involved
Also it keeps having taxon changes every 5 minutes with stuff getting rolled into a b.buteo ssp or being split off into a morphologically identical sp and I’m this close to losing it I swear to god. Anyway heres a common buzzard and a bunch of birds its range overlaps with. Yes these are all different species no I am not fucking with you
Common Buzzard, Upland Buzzard, Eastern Buzzard
Himalayan Buzzard, Long Legged Buzzard, Forest Buzzard
Now that you are starting to understand my ire, the next joke: This Motherfucker
That image is allegedly of a Cape Buzzard. What’s a Cape Buzzard? Good question. I can’t answer it. It may be a new buteo species found in South Africa. It may be that a handful of migratory Steppe Buzzards are staying in South Africa year round instead of heading back where they came from. It might be that nobody can consistently identify a Forest Buzzard. Who knows. Not me. They won’t let me DNA sequence the buzzards for some reason.
(I cannot, for the life of me, find the photo I used here. However I think you’ve seen enough brown buteos with belly streaking to get the point)
“Hello I’d like to see a specimen of Buteo Buteo ssp Buteo”
Buteo Buteo as stated earlier is the scientific name for Common Buzzards. Ssp stands for subspecies, and b. buteo has a bunch, with are indicated with different names. You can also specify that this is the “default” ssp by repeating the species name. So a steppe buzzard would be buteo buteo ssp vulpinus, while the default is buteo buteo ssp buteo.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. I hope this clarified everything and nothing and that we all understand that taxonomy isn’t real and it can’t hurt us anymore(<– lying)
[Images Description: Several photographs of American Kestrels being grasped by hand. The birds are small raptors that are about the same size as an adult human’s hand and are easily held. /End ID.]
Get grabbed on.
The birds are being handled for research purposes by licensed professionals.
Credits, in image order: 1 © Denisse Anaya, 2-3 © dukeofdeliciousness, 4 © Owen Best, 5 © Nancy Cox, 6 © sbnelsonid, posted on iNaturalist
@rjalker
they usually use mist nets to catch them, they look like this
they check them regularly, remove the birds when they get caught and then band and release them
Genshin Impact wildlife vs. the real-life creatures that inspired them*: Birds of Prey
*[Note: while most Genshin wildlife is fairly obvious in its sources of inspiration, the birds of prey seem to have been designed with more creative license. These identifications are the closest that I could come up with; please let me know if you can make a more positive ID!]
Image sources: x / x / x / x (all images licensed to be reproduced for non-commercial purposes)
i personally think that the brownwing “falcon” is much more likely to be based off of lesser or eurasian kestrels because both of them are within the range of china. also no malar stripe makes me think lesser (ik some individuals do have them), and the plumage of the wing looks sorta like the top of a lessers (but im stretching) but looking at the wiki the french translation calls it a common (eurasian) kestrel so theres that
the lapis glede also may be based off of a brahminy kite (haliastur indus) as they are also in china and their name in other translations calls them stone/lapis/rock kite
but yeah they’ve definitely modeled these based off of accipitriformes rather than falcons
i wonder what they are called in the actual translation of the game and how china labels and classifies raptors. because it could be a translation issue or whatever or the translation team had fuck all knowledge of birds of prey lmao. would also be cool to see the early modelling process for these birds, but i dont think we will
Don’t know anything about Genshin, but I do about accipitriformes, so my 2 cents
The Umbertail Falcon looks a lot like a Changeable Hawk-Eagle to me. The tail barring matches, which it wouldn’t with the grey-headed fish eagle, and that “eyeliner” marking is pretty distinct
I’m gonna be honest, the Brownwing Falcon just looks like a Red Kite to me
It could also be several accipiters or even several falcons, but that light head, red outer and underwing, and those dark flight feathers, it just looks like one. That super defined dark collar isn’t a match, but I can’t find any falcons or accipiters atm that match it either so.
I’m inclined to agree with Brahminy Kite for Lapis Glede, the underwing matches better
The Silkwhite Falcon, is, I think, mostly artistic license. It doesn’t really match up with White Hawk, but there just aren’t many white raptors, especially with white outer wings. I think the closest I can find is a Palm-Nut Vulture
However that dark tipped crest makes me think it could also be an exaggerated take on a very light morph Changeable Hawk-Eagle
ya feel?
blubushie asked:
So based for being a lover of scrub jays. I love them too
scrub jays are everything to me, you have no idea. they are such goofy, wonderful little guys. i grew up with a pretty sizeable local flock of them and honestly at this point im like you know Scrub Jays, My Dear Friend Scrub Jays
Also if you talk to them while you’re out they start recognizing you and let you approach them to get really nice pics like this
Photos all by me, of California Scrub-Jay’s (Aphelocoma californica)
@doodlepede good* news, none of the birds shown would have taken the bait. argentavis is a scavenger and ate carrion, pelagornis were seabirds and ate fish, and omimegalonyx ate largeish rodents. the only bird megafauna i could think that would hunt people would be Haast’s eagle, which ate Moa so…
*good news if you don’t want a bird megafauna themed human sacrifice religion. as the guy who made an animal crossing island themed around a megafauna cult, i might be biased
there’s this hawk which keeps on sitting on my fence in the backyard but it won’t let me take a photo of it so i tried to draw it but I CAN’T DRAW BIRDS
Hey OP, did the hawk happen to look like this?
Bird stole Ahab’s hat. Ongoing issue. Definitely a sign of coming disaster.
@hawkpartys please ID “One of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings”
It’s found in um. Uh. Hold on.
South Pacific Ocean, east of the Solomon Islands?
It steals hats, prophetically. Unclear if hat stealing is standard behavior when non-prophetic circumstances exist. Please advise.
[cracks knuckles] lets go
What do we know
-Red Beak
-"Sea-Hawk" so mostly hangs around water
-South-East Pacific Ocean
-Steals hats
My first thought before any actual checking would be Black Kite(or well, yellow billed kite, but subspecies species tomato tomato). They sure love stealing. But that would involve some overly poetic interpretation of the "red bill" part, so lets see if we have anything else that fits better
It's too far south for Stellar's Sea Eagle, which is a bummer because it appears to be the closest to the whole red bill description, but I think the furthest south you'll find Stellar's is like, South Korea.
The red bill really is a sticking point for me. None of these birds have what I would consider "red bills" anyway, but expanding the consideration to include orange/orangish yellow, that rules out a lot of options. Ospreys, the most commonly known "sea hawk" are right out. White Bellied Sea Eagle, out. Sanford's Sea-Eagle, out.
Okay I actually went ahead and found that passage to see if there were any more descriptions and bingo, we have ". . . the long hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize."
That gives us one more feature-- It's black. or at least mostly black/dark colored. That lets us rule out Brahminy Kite, who was still in the running based on a very stretched definition of red beak.
So I can't make a definitive statement but, my guesses are:
It's either a Black Kite(I'm not getting into the ssp discourse here), and they have a very poetic definition of the color red
What fits: Hooked bill, Black/dark colored hawk, Loves to steal, is in range, likes to be out over the water
What doesn't: How you could consider this bill red, I have no idea
However the behavior is a pretty perfect fit. Black kites love stealing so much they have to put up signs at some beaches about it.
Or a vagrant Stellar's Sea Eagle
What fits: "Red" bill, Black/dark colored hawk, likes to be out over the water
What doesn't: A bit out of range but not crazily so, Hooked bill
I have no idea if Stellar's like to steal hats or not. I've yet to hear anything specific about it
So yeah that's my take, discounting that the man is really confused about what counts as a sea hawk and is talking about a tern or something
I would like to express strong admiration for your raptor ID skills — based on a brief description from a pre-theory of evolution book and a dodgy map.
But what if it's the hawk part that he's being poetic about:
-Red Beak (or red bit near its beak)
-"Sea-Hawk" seabird with a hooked beak
-South-East Pacific Ocean
-Steals hats
-Black/dark coloured
Is it some kind of frigatebird?
(Though I mostly stuck to taking him at his word that it was a "sea hawk", aka an accipitriforme because, well, thats my area of expertise. I'm not great at anything else haha)
Like. The thing about Ishmael MobyDick is that his taxonomy is INCREDIBLY specific and INCREDIBLY suspect. He dragged us through whales by main force, did a lot of “It’s a FISH that BREATHES AIR and has WARM BLOOD and it is my FRIEND (except for Moby Dick, who is a vengeful god and killed my husband).”
His whale/porpoise taxonomy is about 85% correct and then he starts lumping and splitting and we’re all squinting at whale photos and going “wait this is like. An easy morphological call. Why did you do that” and he’s like “narwhals have horns to mark their place in books >:) the rest of this discussion of taxonomy will be manuscript/archive themed” and we’re like “fucking what?” And he’s like “here’s an incredibly vivid description of whale anatomy gleaned from butchering several” and we look it up and yes, that’s absolutely accurate. “We butcher them in a whale-penis apron.” And we’re back in the weeds.
So I was going to say “the only thing we know about this hat-stealer for sure is that it is a bird” but I’m not even sure that’s true. Maybe it’s a particularly spicy sea turtle or a beaked whale.
Ishmael is me whenever anybody asks me taxonomy questions outside of my very specific field of interest honestly. Bugs? You mean the things in my code?
Anyway I’d like to submit sailfish for consideration
Jumped over him and speared his hat like a kebab
For the record, the reason we don't have a Lyme Disease Vaccine is because of antivaxxers(1, 2, 3), not because of ticks, so maybe try redirecting some of that hatred.
Though there is a new Lyme vaccine in human trials right now so maybe keep an eye out so they don't do it again
Ticks are a food source?! Yeah, if you eat bugs.
Yes, ticks are a food source for insectivores. Birds, reptiles, and small mammals mostly
Bird stole Ahab’s hat. Ongoing issue. Definitely a sign of coming disaster.
@hawkpartys please ID “One of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings”
It’s found in um. Uh. Hold on.
South Pacific Ocean, east of the Solomon Islands?
It steals hats, prophetically. Unclear if hat stealing is standard behavior when non-prophetic circumstances exist. Please advise.
[cracks knuckles] lets go
What do we know
-Red Beak
-"Sea-Hawk" so mostly hangs around water
-South-East Pacific Ocean
-Steals hats
My first thought before any actual checking would be Black Kite(or well, yellow billed kite, but subspecies species tomato tomato). They sure love stealing. But that would involve some overly poetic interpretation of the "red bill" part, so lets see if we have anything else that fits better
It's too far south for Stellar's Sea Eagle, which is a bummer because it appears to be the closest to the whole red bill description, but I think the furthest south you'll find Stellar's is like, South Korea.
The red bill really is a sticking point for me. None of these birds have what I would consider "red bills" anyway, but expanding the consideration to include orange/orangish yellow, that rules out a lot of options. Ospreys, the most commonly known "sea hawk" are right out. White Bellied Sea Eagle, out. Sanford's Sea-Eagle, out.
Okay I actually went ahead and found that passage to see if there were any more descriptions and bingo, we have ". . . the long hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize."
That gives us one more feature-- It's black. or at least mostly black/dark colored. That lets us rule out Brahminy Kite, who was still in the running based on a very stretched definition of red beak.
So I can't make a definitive statement but, my guesses are:
It's either a Black Kite(I'm not getting into the ssp discourse here), and they have a very poetic definition of the color red
What fits: Hooked bill, Black/dark colored hawk, Loves to steal, is in range, likes to be out over the water
What doesn't: How you could consider this bill red, I have no idea
However the behavior is a pretty perfect fit. Black kites love stealing so much they have to put up signs at some beaches about it.
Or a vagrant Stellar's Sea Eagle
What fits: "Red" bill, Black/dark colored hawk, likes to be out over the water
What doesn't: A bit out of range but not crazily so, Hooked bill
I have no idea if Stellar's like to steal hats or not. I've yet to hear anything specific about it
So yeah that's my take, discounting that the man is really confused about what counts as a sea hawk and is talking about a tern or something
Thank you so much! This is amazing!
Tragic that Ishmael is being so inexact about taxonomy. He’s usually so reliable.
Come on Ishmael, nothing is more important than the exact kind of bird that stole your hat rn. Get with it
Bird stole Ahab’s hat. Ongoing issue. Definitely a sign of coming disaster.
@hawkpartys please ID “One of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a maze of untrackably swift circlings”
It’s found in um. Uh. Hold on.
South Pacific Ocean, east of the Solomon Islands?
It steals hats, prophetically. Unclear if hat stealing is standard behavior when non-prophetic circumstances exist. Please advise.
[cracks knuckles] lets go
What do we know
-Red Beak
-"Sea-Hawk" so mostly hangs around water
-South-East Pacific Ocean
-Steals hats
My first thought before any actual checking would be Black Kite(or well, yellow billed kite, but subspecies species tomato tomato). They sure love stealing. But that would involve some overly poetic interpretation of the "red bill" part, so lets see if we have anything else that fits better
It's too far south for Stellar's Sea Eagle, which is a bummer because it appears to be the closest to the whole red bill description, but I think the furthest south you'll find Stellar's is like, South Korea.
The red bill really is a sticking point for me. None of these birds have what I would consider "red bills" anyway, but expanding the consideration to include orange/orangish yellow, that rules out a lot of options. Ospreys, the most commonly known "sea hawk" are right out. White Bellied Sea Eagle, out. Sanford's Sea-Eagle, out.
Okay I actually went ahead and found that passage to see if there were any more descriptions and bingo, we have ". . . the long hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize."
That gives us one more feature-- It's black. or at least mostly black/dark colored. That lets us rule out Brahminy Kite, who was still in the running based on a very stretched definition of red beak.
So I can't make a definitive statement but, my guesses are:
It's either a Black Kite(I'm not getting into the ssp discourse here), and they have a very poetic definition of the color red
What fits: Hooked bill, Black/dark colored hawk, Loves to steal, is in range, likes to be out over the water
What doesn't: How you could consider this bill red, I have no idea
However the behavior is a pretty perfect fit. Black kites love stealing so much they have to put up signs at some beaches about it.
Or a vagrant Stellar's Sea Eagle
What fits: "Red" bill, Black/dark colored hawk, likes to be out over the water
What doesn't: A bit out of range but not crazily so, Hooked bill
I have no idea if Stellar's like to steal hats or not. I've yet to hear anything specific about it
So yeah that's my take, discounting that the man is really confused about what counts as a sea hawk and is talking about a tern or something
I would like to express strong admiration for your raptor ID skills — based on a brief description from a pre-theory of evolution book and a dodgy map.
But what if it's the hawk part that he's being poetic about:
-Red Beak (or red bit near its beak)
-"Sea-Hawk" seabird with a hooked beak
-South-East Pacific Ocean
-Steals hats
-Black/dark coloured
Is it some kind of frigatebird?
(Though I mostly stuck to taking him at his word that it was a “sea hawk”, aka an accipitriforme because, well, thats my area of expertise. I’m not great at anything else haha)
