Swainson's Hawk - Cibola National Forest, TX

One of the things we did see on our road trip through the western prairie states was a great deal of hawks sitting on phone poles along the way. Hawk ID can be tricky with dark and light morphs of the same species. Also being from Western Canada, our go to hawk is a Red-tail, In this part of the world, it was Swainson's.  The firest think i look for is the white contained throat patch and the yellow cere (nostril patch.) This was at the very northern border of Texas where it meets the panhandle of Oklahoma.