This past weekend, Brooklyn birders spotted a New York first: a zone-tailed hawk, a rare raptor typically seen only in the southwestern U.S. or Central and South America.
, with only a few hundred pairs breeding in the southwestern U.S., though sightings are more common in Panama and Costa Rica plus eastern Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, and elsewhere. For anyone searching the skies here, look for turkey vulture-esque appearance and behavior — teetering flight, black plumage with white wing feathers, and wings held in a slight V-shape — but with a bright yellow beak and a white band across the tail.
While the sighting was a shock for New York birders, it’s not totally unprecedented, explained Tom Johnson, a birding tour leader forand former songbird counter at the Cape May Bird Observatory. The species’ range has slowly been expanding north, and there’s an increasing pattern of zone-tailed hawks showing up out of their range across the whole United States, including the Northeast, he said.
“The reality is that in most of the zone-tailed hawk’s range, it occurs at low density and is uncommon and patchily distributed, so we don’t really have a good handle on what they’re doing in terms of their movements,” said Johnson. Panetta said that another one of the finders plans to file a sighting report to the New York State Ornithological Association’s Avian Records Committee so that the episode enters the official record. Hawkwatchers across the Northeast are on high alert hoping to get a chance at seeing this same bird at their local spots, said Brian Rusnica, president of the Eastern Massachusetts Hawk Watch organization.
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