Comments on: December Trivia Question

By: Peter Wilkinson

Peter Wilkinson — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:58:10 +0000

Marsh. Then the sequence is old bird of prey names, ascending in size order, for, if I recall correctly, Sharpie, Merlin, Peregrine and Northern Harrier.

By: Elwood Hain

Elwood Hain — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:35:42 +0000

Maybe it is a backwards progression of well known extinctions. If so the next bird name is auk, as in Great Auk.

Here is the sequence, latest extinction first:
Merritt Island Sparrow
Passenger Pigeon
Laborador Duck
Great Auk

Somewhere in there New England lost its Heath Hen too, but I think it was between the duck and the pigeon.

By: Andy Jones

Andy Jones — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 02:23:06 +0000

Well I suppose I would go with the progression of alternate names of increasingly large falcons. Sparrow Hawk, Pigeon Hawk, Duck Hawk, and PARTRIDGE HAWK. The latter is an alternate name for the Gyrfalcon.

By: Kenneth Petersen

Kenneth Petersen — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:24:25 +0000

An equally likely answer would be “Chicken”, from another old name for Red-tailed Hawk — Chicken Hawk.

By: Glenn Mahler

Glenn Mahler — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 21:01:23 +0000

Gyr

…Hawk, …Hawk,…Duck, …Falcon

By: Michael Bowen

Michael Bowen — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:09:38 +0000

Well this one looked easy enough at first glance. Old-timers like me first learned American Kestrel, Merlin, and Peregrine Falcon as Sparrow Hawk, Pigeon Hawk, and Duck Hawk. So the series may be one of prefixes for the names of hawks. Next in line, especially if we are talking about old-timer names for hawks, could be FISH (Osprey). Isn’t that neat!

But wait a second — the setter of the riddle specified the next “bird name” in the series. And “fish” is not a bird, even old-timers know that

A likely answer is CRANE. Sparrow Hawk, Pigeon Hawk and Duck Hawk are still reasonably common in the ABA area (not that the riddle setter ever mentions the ABA area specifically); Crane Hawk is a Mexican, Central American and South American bird, with very few ABA-area records. But I kind of think it fits.

As a clincher — well, a suggestion, anyway — Sparrow, Pigeon, Duck, and Crane present a progression of increasing size.

So what’s next in line? Cuckoo-Hawk and Harrier-Hawk are both hyphenated and the wrong size to boot. Is there an “Elephant Hawk” anywhere in the world?