On Saturday, April 27, Nicole Janke looked up in the sky over her house in Liberty County, Georgia, to find and, amazingly enough, photograph a Short-tailed Hawk passing by. The logistics, and sheer luck, of this find in which Janke spotted the bird and definitively photographed it, are completely incredible to me.
In any case, pending acceptance, this is a first state record for Georgia and one of only a very small handful of records of this tropical species away from Florida, Texas, or Arizona.
Photo by Nicole Janke, used with permission
Hinesville is in eastern Georgia, approximately 2 hours north of Jacksonville, Florida, and one not quite one hour south of Savannah. Nicole is open to accepting visitors to her house, directions to which have been posted on the Georgia listerv here.
Remarkably, the hawk was found again this morning (4/28) at the same address, diving at the many Purple Martins using gourd houses on Janke's property. It flew off at around 12:30 PM after being mobbed by jays.
Short-tailed Hawk is widespread in the neotropics south to northern Argentina, but until relatively recently was only known to breed in the ABA-Area in Florida, where it's fairly common from the central part of the state south to the tip of the peninsula.
In the last few years it has also begun breeding in southeastern Arizona, and vagrants have turned with some regularity in Texas with one remarkable record from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 2005. Prior records in New Mexico, north Texas, and as close to Georgia as the Jacksonville area suggest that Georgia birders were right to be on the lookout for this one.
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