Dark morph Ferruginous
One of the three ferruginous hawks alluded to in the previous post was a dark morph individual, seen here intently checking out something on the ground (a hiker's dog I think).
Dark morph ferruginous hawks are more rare than light morph individuals, though I couldn't find any (reliable) info on how rare dark morphs are. Herein lies a good example of why one should be leery of AI info from the web. Google's AI Overview declared dark morphs are 10% of the "population." Digging deeper to find the source of this info lead to a single item on a photographer's website that lacked attribution, and didn't define what the population being considered was. Additional digging found another source on a birders' chat site (also lacking a reference) that indicated 5% of the US population was dark morph and 10% of the Canadian population was dark morph. My guess is the info is out there somewhere, but Google AI had not found it, and relied on a single unreferenced source to broadcast.
Dark morph Ferruginous
One of the three ferruginous hawks alluded to in the previous post was a dark morph individual, seen here intently checking out something on the ground (a hiker's dog I think).
Dark morph ferruginous hawks are more rare than light morph individuals, though I couldn't find any (reliable) info on how rare dark morphs are. Herein lies a good example of why one should be leery of AI info from the web. Google's AI Overview declared dark morphs are 10% of the "population." Digging deeper to find the source of this info lead to a single item on a photographer's website that lacked attribution, and didn't define what the population being considered was. Additional digging found another source on a birders' chat site (also lacking a reference) that indicated 5% of the US population was dark morph and 10% of the Canadian population was dark morph. My guess is the info is out there somewhere, but Google AI had not found it, and relied on a single unreferenced source to broadcast.