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Bird ID Needed
allen griggs
Member Posts: 35,616 ✭✭✭✭
I saw this guy early this morning perched high in a tree overlooking the river. I think he wanted a fish for breakfast. He's about 2 feet long, beak to tip of tail.
Comments
appears to me to be an Osprey .
Mule
Definitely an Osprey.
Tons of them around here.
Little unusual to see one in the mountains of NC I would think .
They are most places where they can fish. The French Broad River likey offers a good catch.
We get a few around here. They like the lake across the road.
Thanks for the ID. I thought it was an eagle. There aren't many ospreys around here.
I used to live in Washington State near the Pend Orielle River. There were lots of ospreys, and they built huge nests on top of trees near the river.
If you have some time to kill sit and watch him catch fish. It's quite a show!
Coastal nc is overrun with osprey. Seeing one in the mountains is unusual. He is about 275 miles off course .
In my SUCCESS post on the far left upper, you can just see the side of a cell tower on our property. The top of it seems to make a great nesting site for Ospreys. Three days a week of shotguns blasting doesn't seem to faze them in the least. Pretty tolerant and adaptable critters. Bob
I see them on the lakes here in upstate SC
They are in north west NC and north east TN.
Safe to call it a fish hawk/eagle, He Dog?
You can call it any thing you like. Biologically it is neither a hawk nor an eagle, but what people call things regionally has little to do with biology. Vultures are commonly called buzzards, but buzzards actually a group of hawks including the red-tail, and vultures are actually vultures.
The osprey is a monotypic species and genus. It is distantly related to the goshawk, Cooper's hawk and sharp shinned. So you could call a fish hawk I suppose, but why would you not just call it an osprey?
Fish hawk is more hillbilly.
Sometimes it pays to call things what the local folks do. While I was working as a Park Naturalist in the Ouachita Mountains, a pair of grad students spent much of the summer doing a population study on the Rich Mountain Salamander. The old maintenance supervisor who had always lived in the area was very interested, and said he would love to see one, When they showed him a picture, he said "Why H***! Them's water dogs." He was able then to steer them onto a small community they were unaware of.
maybe he was just looking for that toilet that was in the river near Allen………
Does that suit you better?🤣
Looks like a black bird to me
Gonna need to get those moderator eyeglasses checked Joe.
…to be more specific of what type of black bird, we go by size.
Dam big ol black bird =osprey thing
Big ol black bird = like a raven
Ol black bird = crow
And don't even get started on those trash eating magpies
And you haven't even mentioned actual blackbirds. Interesting taxonomy to say the least.
Big ol black bird = like a raven Ol black bird = crow
My neighbor refers to these, collectively, as 'soul chickens'…
Back in the early 1980's.......they made nice targets in the peanut fields of SW Oklahoma. I'd set up in a "fort" of hay bales with my Rem 40XB 22-250.
Tough targets........mostly feathers.😬