A little two-fisted birdwatcher came into the world near the wild shores of the Hudson River this morning.

He had two fists, okay, clenched tough-guy style.

He also had what it takes for the people around him to know he was a he, right off the bat.

Further up river, there are Bald Eagles and they don’t have it so easy. When it comes to identifying gender, there’s nothing that stands out.

Both male and female look the same from eaglet-hood on through adulthood. Yeah, there are hard-core ornithologists who can, maybe, catch subtle differences.

The female’s often a little bigger than the male, and might have a slightly thicker beak.

But when you see just one Bald Eagle out there over the Hudson, flying low, snagging fish, is it a guy or a girl?

Male or Female?

No way are you going to know the answer.

But that brings up a better question: how do eagles themselves know who’s the opposite sex?

They clearly do know. They fall for each other, bond up, do the whole mating thing, then build a heavily engineered nest of branches.  And begin raising kids.

Which raises another question: When a little eaglet hatches, and the parents look at it coming out of its shell, how do they know what they just had?

What do they tell the relatives?

Boy eagle or girl eagle?

If there’s an easy answer to this question, we don’t know it.

Meanwhile, we’re glad that the little guy who came on the scene near the Hudson today was a human boy sporting all the evidence needed to make the identification quick and easy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2011 at 2:22 pm and is filed under "Daily Sightings" A Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.