I have had plenty of opportunities to photograph Red-tailed Hawks as they are one of the more abundant residential species of hawks in the United States. Back home in Iowa you can see them on the sides of roads, in trees and on fence posts. They are in really great numbers in Iowa!
I had the opportunity to get a leucistic individual at Teaneck Creek Conservancy in Teaneck, NJ. Someone from the "TCC" also took some photographs that same day and inquired about the bird to the Cornell Ornithology online lab. Cornell is a pre-eminent place for scientific bird studies not only in New York (Ithaca) and the Northeast, but in the world as well!
A link to Cornell's world-renowned Ornithology Lab.
http://www.birds.cornell.edu/Page.aspx?pid=1478
The lab quickly got back to the TCC and told them that the individual was a leucistic Red-tailed Hawk. Leucism is the lack of pigments in the cells that produce the pigments for color. Leucism can also be witnessed in mammals, reptiles and amphibians.
I have seen a picture of a solid white leucistic Red-tailed Hawk elsewhere on the internet. It is my guess that there are varying degrees of leucism. The individual I saw happened to have the brown barring on the tail feathers, however, the red pigments were void.
Red-tailed Hawk devouring a rabbit in Fair Lawn, NJ!
Leucistic Red-tailed Hawk. There is little to no red pigment in the feathers of the head and tail.
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