This is only remarkable because of where I live, in a fairly built up town outside of Boston, about 30 miles from the shore, with no big bodies of water nearby.
According to my rules I am able to add it to my “yard list” of birds I have seen from my front yard since we have lived in this house. We only have 10,000 sq. ft. so my rule is I have to be somewhere on the property when I see or hear the bird in order to add it to the list. He did fly pretty much directly over the house though so he was even in “my” airspace if you want to get technical.
The giveaway was the bright, all-white tail, in addition to the immense size and flat wings while soaring. This is the time of year when they start moving generally inland and north from their winter quarters on the coast.
Haven’t seen one from my yard, but I have seen bald eagles twice in the DC area - once in Lake Accotink Park and once in Charles County. Them’s impressive burdies
My best yard bird when I lived in the Bronx was a Snowy Owl. It was perched on a neighbor’s roof where it was being harassed by crows.
I sometimes get Peregrine Falcons from my apartment window here in downtown Panama City. They sit on the neighboring buildings and pounce on pigeons. Once one flew up and perched on the airconditioner just in front of me when I was working on the computer. I tried to inch over and grab a camera but it took fright and flew away.
As late as the '70’s, we rarely saw a bald eagle here in Seattle. If I recall correctly, DDT had nearly wiped them out. Now, they’re all over the place and we occasionally see a golden eagle too. Peregrine falcons and other raptors were once pretty rare too.
When I lived downtown, a merlin caught a starling right outside my window and took it to a section of the roof that was a couple of floors below me. He stayed all afternoon, dining on his catch, and didn’t seem too perturbed when a couple of us carefully stuck our heads around a door about ten feet away for a closer look.
Where I live now, my view consists only of a small patio area, hemmed in by six foot high fences and the wall of the carport in back. I was fortunate to have a male sharp-shinned hawk visit several times this winter. Though I know he was looking for one of my sparrows or juncos to dine on, I can’t help but be awed by his presence whenever I see him.
Colibri, I would love to see any kind of owl in the wild. There was a snowy that used to roost on sill of a big stained-glass window on an old church near downtown in the winters. I wish I’d taken the opportunity to go see it while I had the chance.
Once I was driving up I-95 just south of the DC Beltway and a bald eagle was flying overhead, following the road. I almost swerved off the road because I was so astounded to see it! But it wasn’t that surprising though because there’s lots of bald eagles along the Potomac from the Wilson Bridge south to Mason Neck.
I don’t know if there is an official set of rules anywhere for composing yard lists. Like I said, those are my rules but I think other people might stipulate the bird has to actually be in the yard, flyovers that I include wouldn’t count for them.
Anyway if it were me even if I needed binoculars to identify what kind of bird it was, as long as I could see that it was a bird without using the binos I would probably include it.
I understand there are snowy owls wintering over at Boston’s Logan airport most winters, I guess the huge open spaces remind them of the tundra they are from. I haven’t been to see them and I understand it was easier to roam around the perimeter of the airport with binoculars before 9/11.
My usual owl seen in the wild has been Great Horned owls at sunset, often in the fall or winter when the trees are bare of leaves. I have seen their distinctive bulky, horned silhouette several times in my life.
I also got within a few feet of a type of screech owl when I was in Ecuador last summer, he was just roosting on a branch over a trail, again at sunset. I got great pictures of him but I still don’t have any pictures online.
Often local birders will know the best places to find owls roosting by day. They are often in dense pines, tree holes, or other dark cavities. I do the Bronx Christmas count every year, and there are pine groves where we almost always find Great Horned Owls roosting during the day, and sometimes Saw-whets. On rarer occasions we have had Long-eared, Barred, and Barn. Sometimes you can flush Short-eared from areas with tall grass.
Some years Snowys can be found along the beaches in winter. I have seen them in New York in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx and also at Jones Beach.
We had a bald eagle for a couple months this year until the Fox frooze over. It probly went back to the Wisconsin by Sauk City then. It was in the tall tree at sunrise many mornings. I call it my Serengeti tree, because it’s in a field of long grass all alone. I didn’t get a detailed picture due to not enough magifivation on the camera. You can see a large bird shape against the sun rise, but no details. It never landed in the house yard.
My yard rule is simply that I have to see it from my yard. As a practical matter, this means either in my yard or the neighboring yard, though occasionally swifts and swallows will pass high overhead, and I get to count them. My list is at about 25, which owes its patheticness to the fact that I live in an even more built-up area, even closer to Boston. I’ve never seen an owl at all. The one raptor we get is the red-tailed hawk.
I’ve got three owls on my yard list but all are voice only, I didn’t see them. We hear screech owls pretty often in the summer. Late one winter night we were awakened by the hooting of a Great Horned Owl (which are apparently comfortable in fairly built up areas). And one fine spring day I heard an odd repetitive sound, like a small child tooting on a whistle again and again. A few minutes with my bird call CDs told me that I had heard the call of a Saw-whet Owl.
We have what a local expert says is a barn owl living here in our suburban neighborhood. (She said they’re are perfectly at home in a palm tree, which we have many more of than we have barns.) We were periodically seeing scattered pigeon feathers in the alleyway for a long time, and it always happened overnight. I started to suspect an owl, and, sure enough, we saw it a couple of weeks ago sitting nonchalantly on a telephone wire.
“How do you know it’s an owl?” my husband asked, whereupon it turned its head half-way around and gave us The Look.
A few years ago I was curious about your name, so I Googled it. I also Googled pseudotriton ruber ruber’s name at that time. I wonder if snowy owls would eat red salamanders if they had a chance? I also know that Colibri is the genus name for the hummingbird. We seem to have lots of critters on these boards.
Yesterday, there was a Bewick’s wren in a bush in the front yard of our building busily making that bubbly sound they make. That’s my first one since November or early December.
Anyone in the Puget Sound area can check out The Tweeters List for unusual sightings in Western and often Eastern Washington too. There also The Seattle Audubon Society’s Rare Bird Alerts. Just thought I’d throw that in here.
