This morning after I ha gotten to dads and did my reading I went to the lake.
It was cloudy out but not bad other then that.
I first went to the peninsula looked at the swallows that were flying around and then decided I go down by the radio station because they were flying back and forth by it. So I walked up the road to the radio station walked down a little trail to the lake and walked out on to a mat of floating plants. I stood out there watching the swallows fly back and forth up and down the lake I would look through the swallows as they flew by and try to pick put the cliff swallow or the violet-green swallow. I would watch see one of the swallows try and get good photos of it before it would be gone. About half way through the time that I spent down there I saw an odd looking raptor soaring over the trees on the far side of the lake. I started taking photos of it the I sent dad a text as it went up the lake. After the raptor had gone from site I went back to trying to get photos of the swallows. It started to rain and short time later and since it was almost time for me to go home any way I just left a little earlier then I had planed.
I got home got the photos onto the computer of the raptor looked at them a little bit more and decided that it was a hawk of some kind. I looked through the bird book and decided that it looked most like a swainson’s hawk to me, but since I did not have very good photos of it and that that would be the first report for Sitka that I knew of, I did not say that it was a swainson’s hawk because it could have also been a red tailed hawk and those would be more likely to be here then a swainson’s hawk would. So I took some of the best photos edited them a little and put them up on inaturalist (which is a wed site that you can put observations on that you have of different things that are a live or had been a live, and different people are on there and they help identify things if they can). Since I had very little experience with swainson’s hawks or the other varieties of red tailed hawks that there are I put it up there in hopes that some one could help identify for me. I looked back a bit later and every one who had responded to the post said that it was a swainson’s hawk.
We had a big wind and rain storm the day and the night before with an east wind in the beginning but then it switched to more of a south wind and I think that that is part of the reason the swainson’s hawk showed up here. Because it had gotten blown of course by the storm and ended up out here.
- Question where did the swainson’s hawk come from?
- Question how long had the swainson’s hawk been on baranof island before I saw it?
- Question where did it go after it flew away up towards the end of the lake?
Swainson’s hawk
