See, that’s more than I know. I can see if something is a hawk. I can identify owls and bald eagles. Beyond that… That’s why I just call them raptors.
Are you flying again soon? If so, watch out for condors.
I was once told (by the lawyer who defended the master of the Exxon Valdez) that in the US, one of the few things that can result in you being criminally prosecuted for an act of mere negligence was killing certain protected wildlife (certain categories of migratory bird?). I think the (somewhat fanciful) example he gave was that if while driving you negligently (but not recklessly or deliberately) struck a man holding a migratory bird, killing them both, you could be prosecuted for killing the bird but not the man.
I can tell a eagles and hawks from owls, bald eagles all the time, juvenile bald eagle or golden eagle, a kestrel as long as my sense of scale is in shape, and red-tail or Merlin on a good day (if they’re backlit, though, all I can say is it’s not an eagle), but otherwise I’m reliant on my mother to identify raptors. I sometimes call home from college to describe birds I’ve seen just to get her to tell me what they are.
I thought I would throw in for Toronto
Were you up here recently johnny
Declan
I bonked a turkey vulture with my car a couple years ago. He and two friends were enjoying a meal along a tree-lined roadway. When my car approached, two of them flew off but the third didn’t have anywhere to go except my direction. I tried to stop but he hit my windshield hard, broke the wiper off the arm. I thought he was coming through the windshield but luckily no damage other than the wiper.