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, I found myself at Lighthouse Pt in New Haven, CT during a healthy passage of buteos and eagles. These large raptor days are all too scarce at Lighthouse, where it takes a well-timed late Oct-early Nov cold front to produce a day like this along the Connecticut coast. A zoom-in on the face strongly indicates a whitish cheek that offsets a dark malar, which is another Krider's-like feature. As Red-tail expert Brian Sullivan notes, you can't say much without upperpart photos in this case.

Another New Haven Harbor hybrid, amongst a wintering mixed scaup flock. I have seen this bird three times, initially on January 19th. In the field I certainly found the bird to give more of a Greater Scaup-like vibe, based on body, head, and bill shape & size, for what it's worth. However it has been hypothesized that the mediocre open-wing photo is pro-Lesser, as the obvious white is restricted to the secondaries, but I'm not convinced that is anything more than suggestive.

On March 20th, while scanning the scaup flock from the West Haven Boat Ramp, I noticed a hybrid Tufted Duck. Luckily there were no tense moments here - with the sun at my back, though the bird was distant, the dark gray (not black) back and short, blunt-ended tuft immediately declared this bird as a scaup hybrid and not a bona fide I hopped on the boat and tried to approach the scaup flocks, a process that turned out more difficult than I had hoped. I eventually refound the bird among the scattered Greater Scaup flocks and got as close as I could (which was not very close at all).

Back in the summer of 2007 I began to piece together an article, later published in The Connecticut Warbler, that attempted to predict (I mean ‘guess') the next 15 bird species to be added to the CT state list. How time flies