I teamed up with the legend known only as J B - for some good olde Lake Erie hawkwatching on Oct 5.
A late RTHU, ~120 AGPL, ~175 AWPE, ~2600 TUVU, 6 PEFA, 4 swallow species including Bank and ~30 Barn (!!) Swallows, ~165 PISI, ~300 warblers...
Pretty spectacular. Perhaps the only thing keeping it from being an all-time great day would be to bump the TUVU numbers over 10k... Or 2-3 SWHA... or something like a COKI...... Alas, if those things happened all the time, they wouldn't be so special.
One interesting bird is this Merlin (above). At the time, we were talking about cameras and autofocus ... A Merlin had zipped by close earlier in the day, but I didn't think about grabbing a picture until it was too late. I saw one coming, went for my camera, and managed a few images. It seemed dark, but I assumed it was just the backlighting. I saved the image because I thought it looked neat. I looked closer and boy it really was very dark & unusually marked...
A less artistic / better exposed view. I remembered Tom Johnson and Tim Lenz had a Black Merlin in New York several years ago... I pulled up the checklist for reference. They noted "the general lack of pale spotting/ barring on the remiges, which are very important to the subspecific identification" ... The reference link no longer works, but it's the Systematics and Evolution of the North American Merlins by S. A. Temple. Link here.
Other features of Black Merlin are reduced tail bars, a darker head... Long story short, it very much has features of Black Merlin. My big question is - is it really? Or is there variation in other populations that has a bird that can look like this? I queried the Great Lakes Bird Study Group (on discord) and got a 10/10 response from Lucas Wilson who has looked into this question before.
I went back and saved the 3 other pictures I had of the bird. While I wish I had "noticed" it more in the field, it will be something fun to revisit in the future!
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