Fink Family Farm Bird List

Fink Family Farm Bird List

The only list I faithfully keep is a list of all the birds seen on our farm since we moved here in 1977. I thought it would be fun to add p...

Sunday, November 26, 2017

White Wing

Today, Nov. 26, 2017, for the first time in months, we saw White Wing, the mostly white Red-tailed Hawk with a lovely red tail that hangs out in the Grand Ronde area, west of Grand Ronde Rd and north of the Salmon River Hwy (Hwy 18). It seems to hunt along the power lines there. It was raining today and my camera turned the raindrops white.

Nov. 26, 2017




I thought I'd try to find past photos of White Wing with dates and see if he (she?) has changed over the years. This will be a work in progress...

The first email I saved about this hawk was in March of 2005 but I did not say when we had first seen it. In April of 2006, Mary Ann Sohlstrom wrote to tell me about the leucistic Red-tail she and friends saw on the wire by the Nazarene Church in Grand Ronde. That has been a favorite spot for that hawk over the years.



On Aug. 8, 2007, I wrote this email:
Today I saw White Wing on a low evergreen pretty close to the
Nazarene Church in Grand Ronde. A bit farther away, on one of
the power line poles, was another Red-tailed Hawk. This was the
one Carol Karlen and Marilyn VanDyk spotted in the same location
yesterday and called to tell me about. It looks like a normal
red-tail from the front, but from the back, it is quite
different. It has a wide, white chevron, white eyebrow, and
white terminal tail band on a red tail. Pretty bird. It's 
an adult so I don't know if this is a White Wing parent,
sibling, or offspring.



I have saved no other emails but we have seen White Wing every year since, so it is at least 13 years old.

May 30, 2012


 October, 2012

November 2013






November 2017
February 2, 2018, White Wing was sitting in a distant tree. My photo is not good. Shortly after, it took off and was joined by a second red-tailed hawk. They soared together. I think White Wing has a mate! With luck we'll see them sitting side by side sometime so we know, by size, if White Wing is a male or female.

February 2018



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