Last week I posted a collage of Red-tailed Hawk images that exhibited the diversity amongst the different subspecies.  Today I was going through my Rough-legged Hawk images and even though these are all the same species the diversity of age, color phase and gender is a beautiful thing to see when laid out in front of you.

We who live in the midwest should be grateful our winter skies have such beauty overhead.  The deep blue skies contrasted by these gorgeous creatures is a sight to behold and everyone should venture outside for at least a few hours regardless of how cold it is.  But on extremely cold blustery winter days like today as I write this maybe just looking at some photos will suffice.  Hope so!

The collection below is by no means a complete spectrum of plumages but rather just a small sampling. For those of you that want to take this a step further and try and age & sex these fine birds, please do so.  I’ll be the first to admit I’m not an expert on raptor identification but do enjoy trying my best to figure out what I’m actually seeing.  And I’ll further admit there’s a couple here that threw me off a bit . . . .

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All images © Copyright Vic Berardi and cannot be used for any purposes without written permission.