Author Archives: Bryce W. Robinson

After months of waiting, our birds Kansas 01 and 02 have started their fall migration back to their wintering areas in Kansas. We now know where each bird breeds, and we can tell a bit about each just from this knowledge. Surprisingly, both birds breed in an area of northern British Columbia, in a glacialContinue reading “We have breeding locations!”

The question of whether or not Western Red-tailed Hawks winter on the great plains has been debated for years. Below I detail an anecdote that shows that at least one bird does… We were surprised to catch the bird below in eastern Kansas last winter. It’s a rufous bird that as far as I canContinue reading “Are there B. j. calurus that winter in the great plains?”

In February 2020, we trapped a very interesting dark bird north of Atchison, Kansas. We were targeting dark non-harlani for our transmitter effort to track these birds to their breeding grounds as a first step for understanding if the subspecies abieticola is polymorphic. At first pass this bird looked like our target, but when weContinue reading “A Potential Intergrade harlani X abieticola”

On April 25, a friend, Sylvain Bourdages, found one of our birds, Kansas 02 (purple track below), near Grand Prairie, Alberta, Canada. Although the bird was far from the road, Sylvain was able to take a few photos. We thought it would be a nice thing to share along with an update on where weContinue reading “KANSAS 02 Spotted in Canada, and an Update on our Birds”

In late February 2020, Bryce, Luke, and Mark teamed up in eastern Kansas to trap two dark morph, non-harlani Red-tailed Hawks. The objective was to deploy GSM transmitters to better understand where this phenotype breeds, and along with blood and feather samples thus discover their proper subspecies designation. In the past, this type was consideredContinue reading “Meet our Current Birds Gathering Movement Data”