… More Than You Bargain For

Mystery bird

My dad used to give me the sage advice: Sometimes ya get more than ya bargain for. This was usually in reference to my ending up on the short end of a fight I picked with some bigger kid, and, later in life, in reference to cars or girls—or both. But there’s a positive side to the saying and, often enough, it applies to birding.
Tuesday was one of those days when Susan and I had full schedules that kept us passing likes ships in the night, so to speak. Late in the afternoon she suggested we make a really quick trip down to Indigo Lake in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park where, the day before, six Long-tailed Ducks had been sighted. The Long-tailed Duck is a bird we don’t see often—or often enough. It’s a sea duck, so having them inland is a treat—though not unprecedented. It’s also a quite vocal bird (thus its former name, Old Squaw) that nests on the Arctic tundra. Monday will go down in the Ohio record-keeping books as a good day for Long-tailed Ducks. They were reported in bunches (that’s a technical ornithological term) all over the state.
I suggested we use my car because my spotting scope was still bouncing around in the trunk with fishing gear. Equipment from two or three excursions often gets jumbled in my trunk. I thought about grabbing the camera, but it was down stairs and, besides, we wouldn’t see anything special enough to justify lugging the gear along. (Saying that is the one sure way to guarantee the picture of a lifetime—missed.)
About a half mile north of the lake Susan yelled, “Look at that bird!”
To my credit, I managed to keep the car only slightly out of the ditch while looking at a huge white bird atop a tree, making a U-turn and scrambling out of the car—all without taking the binoculars away from my eyes. We looked up in amazement at what appeared to be a Snowy Owl. After we blinked our eyes we realized we were looking at a partially albino, or leucistic, Red-tailed Hawk. It was not a true albino because we could see some black on it. In fact, as it soared with three other red tails, its wing pattern was a spectacular alternating black and white.
If you’re thinking this was the photo op of a lifetime, your right. I did have my handy point-and-shoot camera, with which I took the (I hesitate to call them pictures) photos shown here. I think you’ll get the idea, however, that this was a special bird, the chance of a lifetime—and more than we bargained for.


Leucistic Red-tailed Hawk