For the most part, I write about birds that are small, familiar, and approachable. As interesting as godwits, prairie falcons, or surf scoters may be, such birds tend to stay beyond the simple circle of physical proximity that defines our most deeply lived lives. Binoculars and spotting scopes can make birds appear closer than they are, but yards and miles still impose an unavoidable distancing, a limitation of shared experience and mutual awareness. Watching one of those unapproachable birds in a scope takes a significant step away from convivial interaction towards mere passive consumption, as if watching a filmed documentary. But in the case of a backyard jay or titmouse or hummingbird, you can get closer, can see and hear them every day as they share your home and you share theirs.
The world of hawks has an interesting place on this spectrum. On the one hand, wild hawks are never as approachable as, say, a hummingbird: they feel significant trepidation towards humans and don’t look for handouts like the feeder birds. But there are nonetheless a few species that strongly overlap with our human neighborhoods, most notably the big four which I overviewed in my Neighborhood Hawks: the red-tailed, red-shouldered, Cooper’s, and sharp-shinned hawks. Of these, the red-tailed hawk is the biggest, most widespread, most abundant, and most iconic. If you know one hawk, it should be this one.
They live among us, they live apart
So, generally abundant, regularly seen, and easily recognizable (even bird-illiterates know what a hawk looks like), but at the same time distant and unapproachable: this is the fundamental background for our relations with hawks. And this distancing isn’t simply a lack of proximity, an absence of opportunity for closer acquaintance: we often perceive it as a character trait in itself, even an ennobling feature:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
It’s a well-known little Tennyson fragment entitled “The Eagle,” and one I’ve quoted before, but it brings up a setting and a particular human word that has some deep ramifications when we consider the broader ecological context of hawks: “lonely.” Many classes of birds are instinctively social and spend the bulk of the year in flocks. This covers a wide swathe of the avian world, from finches to sandpipers, ducks to gulls. A fair number of others maintain a tight year-round pair bond, like the titmouse and towhee I’ve discussed before. Some degree of cooperative living is the standard practice with birds, as it is with humans, because it has advantages: the collective ability to find food and avoid predators enhances each bird’s odds of survival.
Hawks also form long-term pair bonds, but they are cyclical rather than continuous, and relaxing into isolation rather than into larger winter flocks. Each spring they reunite with their mate when hormonally compelled, but in most cases their default state is solitude. Migratory raptors will completely part company with their mates outside of the nesting season; non-migratory birds will continue to share a general territory, but on an understanding closer to “tolerated neighbor down the street” rather than “indispensable partner in my every activity” à la towhee.
What did I say the advantages of flocking were? Finding food and predator avoidance. But for a red-tailed hawk, the rules are different than for a tiny bushtit, with deeply ingrained consequences for one’s social life. A common simplified diagram of ecological “trophic levels” often takes the shape of a pyramid:
At the bottom of the pyramid, where the origin of the energy and nutrients is the sun and soil, there are many organisms, by number and by mass. As you ascend, energy is lost along the way: every creature takes in calories that are dissipated by living and are not transferred to its predator. At the top you have fewer animals, specializing in larger prey that are themselves not inexhaustibly numerous. Extensive sharing is not a viable life plan for red-tails: there is only so much appropriate food within a given geographical territory. Outside of the springtime abundance when birds time their nesting – which is still an exhausting, difficult time of year – each red-tail needs his exclusive personal acreage and its supply of prey.
Nor do hawks need to band together to warn of or ward off predators. They have few, the most notable of whom in recent centuries have been overpowered humans, from whom no alliance of hawks could provide protection. Instead they are the subject of concerted defensive action from lower on the food chain, with smaller birds like crows, jays, blackbirds, and mockingbirds often attempting to drive them away. In these situations, hawks are victims more than bullies, though the overall threat to their life is minimal. (Red-tails are not generally nimble enough to catch a small active bird who is aware of their presence, making such attacks relatively safe for the harassers, but they are dangerous enough that you would rather not have them living next door constantly looking over your fence at your kids and family in case they get careless.)
Limits of food supply and the loneliness of the predator: there are fundamental consequences of their ecological role that enforce the solitude of red-tails. How does that solitude affect their relationships with us people? In much of our cultural history – such as orthodox, traditional pieces like the Tennyson fragment – you can see how we readily translate raptorial isolation into a certain nobility, a kind of aristocratic hauteur as they watch the crawling masses from the lordly peaks of their castle towers. Such placing of hawks at the top of bird hierarchies is near universal throughout the big picture of historical human culture.
In our democratic age, we’re less likely to naturally gravitate towards such sorting of animals into permanent “classes,” at least explicitly. But even when you are talking with the most socially-progressive, egalitarian-minded human you can find, he will often take special notice of hawks, instinctively view them as more substantial, noble, and commanding of respect than your average little songbird or sandpiper. Bigness and immediate personal scarcity (as opposed to invariable flocking) cause this immediate mental categorization that is rarely entirely absent, no matter how strongly our general philosophical inclination may be in favor of the little guys.
So such is the typical immediate impression derived from large size and aloneness: that these birds are imposing individuals rather than mere members of a flock of flitting lightweights. That is the default starting point for most humans on seeing a hawk.
What are raptors, physically?
Another big part of our readiness to label raptors as noble and majestic is their distinctive collection of physical characteristics. These basic signals of strength and predatory capability are quickly summarized:
Beaks are hooked, the better for tearing flesh. This looks fierce and dangerous because it is.
Talons are likewise sharp and grasping beyond your standard issue birds’ feet.
Eyes are proportionately large, for optimal visual acuity, crucial to hunting. Large eyes tend to give humans an impression of vigilant awareness (they don’t look sleepy), undaunted self-confidence (they are not shifty-eyed), and even intelligence (when attempting interpersonal communication with humans or animals we attempt eye contact – unlike many small songbirds, hawk eyes are large enough for us to perceive as eyes, with directionally aware pupils and so on). Just look at those eyes above.
One of the more notable differences among different hawk groups relates to wing shape, which determines a bird’s aptitude for different styles of flight, and therefore their ability to thrive in different habitats with different prey and different hunting strategies. The birds of the genus Accipiter, for example, have short wings and long tails, making them more adept at short flights with lots of flapping, energy expenditure, and quick changes of direction among trees and obstacles as they pursue prey in brief bursts of activity. The Cooper’s hawk and the sharp-shinned hawk are our most familiar members of this group, and are the birds most likely to be seen pursuing backyard songbirds. Falcons, in contrast, have longer pointed wings, making them fast and powerful, aerodynamic flyers that catch birds on the wing in a straight race. The fastest creature on earth is a diving peregrine falcon, maxing out at over 200 mph. That’s one way to catch a fast-flying shorebird over an open mudflat or sandy beach.
Red-tails belong to the genus Buteo, sometimes Anglicized as “buzzard.” At some point in the history of American English, “buzzard” started to be applied to vultures and now you can’t really use the word in the original sense in America, although the old meaning continues in England, France (buse), and Spain (busardo). This group of hawks has wide wings and short tails, appropriate adaptations for efficient soaring flight. Pete Dunne, probably the preeminent contemporary writer on hawks, summed them up like this:
Buteos are a diverse group of medium-to-large hawks that excel in the art of soaring. These are the keen-eyed wind masters, able to tease lift from temperature-troubled air and to soar for long periods on set wings. They are clipper ships of the skies… Red-taileds are the epitome of a buteo.
– Pete Dunne, Hawks in Flight (his flight identification book; see also his natural history volume Birds of Prey and his narrative hawk vignettes The Wind Masters)
For many of us, the buteos are most closely allied to our basic idea of a hawk. They are the ones we see most often, hunting patiently from a perch or soaring overhead in plain view. Laborious flapping is for short-winged little songbirds; lurking in the trees is for those who need to hide. The mighty red-tail rides the wind and needs no concealment but distance, which renders him invisible to his prey but to his wings and eyes means little.
Red-tails as our central hawk
So far, I’ve mainly dealt in raptor generalities: the red-tail epitomizes the essence of raptordom and is a sterling example of everything I’ve said. But let’s continue delving down into the specifics of this hawk.
How do you identify a red-tail?
You might think it’s easy – the one with a red tail, right? Sometimes, and from the right angle. The two potential pitfalls in this obvious approach are that red-tails do not have a red tail for the first year of their life, just a brown one with thin dark bands, and that even the bright, brick-red tail of adults is only clearly red from above – a soaring bird that you see only from below will have at best a faint orange glow with good light coming through, but often no discernible red at all.
So what else can you look for? Here’s Dunne again on a good first step:
To simplify the identification process, don’t look at a hawk perched on the crossbar of a utility pole, perched on a tree along the highway, or soaring over a woodlot and wonder, “Now, which one of North America’s ten buteo species is that?” Ask instead, “Is that a Red-tailed?” Over most of North America, for much of the year, the odds say yes. If it is not a Red-tailed, then start considering other possibilities.
If it’s a big hawk, or a slowly soaring hawk, a red-tail is by far the most likely identity around here. So just learn a few dependable field marks and try to pick out one or more of these to confirm the identity:
- The red tail: if you can see it, that’s a lock.
- The patagial marks: If you see a bird flying fairly close overhead, you can look for these dark patches which are unique to red-tails. Unfortunately we don’t have a familiar word for this part of the body, so we have to use the unfamiliar anatomical term of the “patagium” and its adjectival cousin to describe these as “patagial marks,” the dark patches on the front edge of the wing, close to the body, visible from below. No other raptor has these and they are present on both adults and juveniles.
- Square wing panels: You have to be somewhat close to see the patagial marks. If the hawk is soaring rather farther away, a good field mark to look for are lighter square panels in the wings. This is particularly useful on juvenile birds, where the patches are clearer and there is no red tail to make things easier. They are clear from below, sometimes perceptible from above.
- Dark head and light bib: for perched birds, one of the best things to look for is a lighter “bib” at the top of the breast, with a darker head above and dark streaking below on the belly. The degree of contrast varies among birds, and it often appears lighter on juveniles (adults can develop a kind of brownish wash with a touch of red that reduces the impression of high contrast), but our other common hawks have consistent streaking or lack of streaking through the entirety of the breast and belly.
What do they eat?
I talk with people about their backyard birds all the time. When the subject of hawks come up, there are many people who are declared admirers, but also a distinct cohort who are less enthused. Usually, the antipathy stems from a fear that the hawk in question is eating the backyard songbirds they have come to love. Now, I would rarely argue that any hawk should be condemned on the basis of living out the only means of survival it has – a position of “I would prevent hawks from catching any small birds if I could” is tantamount to saying “I want all the hawks to starve to death,” which rather takes the shine of sympathy off the initial impulse. In the case of red-tails, however, we can largely sidestep this debate: they eat relatively few birds, especially not by catching healthy, nimble little finches and chickadees at your feeding station.
Instead, their main prey are mammals, most typically in the gopher to ground squirrel size class. They are not overly specialized and the exact prey species can vary across the wide range of the American continent in which they are at home, but overall they are unsuited to catching agile, flighted, small things with good vision. Red-tails, remember, are not ambush hunters: they soar out in the open or perch on an exposed perch, not hiding, but just keeping out of the visual radius of short-sighted mammals. If she was to come across an injured or unwary bird while searching for a meal, a red-tail would not be averse to adding a little variety to her diet, and snakes and other reptiles similarly add some spice to life. But the mainstays are mammals, usually accounting for some 75% of their food intake.
Dunne summed up their gastronomic approach like this:
And although small rodents are the mainstay of the bird’s diet throughout most of its range, the Red-tailed Hawk, like many predators, is highly opportunistic. Anything readily available and catchable is an odds-on favorite to become prey. Any furred, feathered, or scaled creature that is smaller than a groundhog and turns its back on a meal-minded Red-tailed Hawk might safely be said to be courting a shortcut toward the cosmic.
But hey, even if they do catch a backyard bird with whom you had some level of personal acquaintance, there are worse ways to go. Death by red-tail is usually pretty fast, and it is a “shortcut toward the cosmic,” or as Robinson Jeffers put it when considering posthumous consumption by turkey vulture, “what an enskyment.” We’re all gonna be just dirt in the ground, but this bird gets to enjoy the interlude of soaring as far above that mortal dirt as any creature on the continent.
Where do you find them?
Yet another Dunne-ism:
For most people, for much of the year, finding Red-tailed Hawks is as easy as commuting to work.
In other words: they’re everywhere, they’re abundant, and they don’t hide. This is true here, and it’s true across the continent. Here is their range map:
Here is the 10 year average of observations from the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory, counting fall hawk migration in the Marin Headlands:
Here is a digital conglomeration of red-tails, from the Crossley Raptor ID Guide:
So why don’t you see more?
Many red-tails will be perfectly obvious, perched on a telephone pole, a sign, a sturdy fence. Sometimes, they may escape superficial detection not because of intervening obstacles, but simply intervening distance, perching on our tallest utility towers or soaring on the edge of sight. It hides them from the quasi-blind tunneling gophers and the like. But we are not naturally as shortsighted as gophers; we have the evolutionary capability of far-seeing, as far as mammals go. We can choose to look with attention and mindfulness, to rise above the Watsons of the world who “see, but do not observe” to Holmesian perspicacity. It is hard to find clues: they come in so many shapes and sizes, and may be dependent on an encyclopedic knowledge of Indo-European cigar ashes of the Victorian era to make any sense. It is easier to find red-tailed hawks, which are relatively uniform in size and habits.
We also have the option of enhancing our vision through the collective ingenuity of humanity, embodied in that invention known as binoculars.
There is, perhaps, no bird which oftener demands the services of binoculars.
– Dawson on the red-tailed hawk
We who live this plodding life here below never know how many eagles are above us. They are concealed in the empyrean. I think I have got the worth of my glass now that it has revealed to me the white-headed eagle.
– Thoreau, The Journal, 1854
It’s true; good optics will make the invisible visible.
How to see red-tails, summarized:
- Know that they are everywhere.
- Remember to look for them and use your eyes.
- Get some binos. (Tips on evaluation and selection are here.)
If you really want to develop your skills, spend some time at a migration site, like our Hawk Hill overlooking the Golden Gate in the Marin Headlands. I’ve been counting hawk migration there for ten years. Sometimes there are slow spells, especially at the beginning and end of the season. You can look at the ocean, you can look at the bridge, and you can look at red-tails. (OK, you can look at turkey vultures too.) There are worse forms of meditation than hours upon hours of watching soaring red-tails. Patience and power, buoyancy and control, overhead and nearby and distant and practically invisible. A tiny flash of a red tail, the slightest V in the wings, a steady, unflapping kiting as a bird holds its position, as if immune from gravity.
That voice
Visually, the red-tail is an imposing creature: the largest of our common hawks, with a four-foot wingspan and the steely glare of a merciless predator. But most of those visible features are just variants on standard raptor appearance: other hawks, eagles, falcons may be smaller or larger, more or less common examples of the same traits. But where red-tails are most uniquely themselves is in their voice, in their long, sinking screams of unrivaled wild fierceness.
These screams are sometimes imitated, but only a genuine, live, soaring red-tail will really give you the undiluted, full-throttle experience. Steller’s jays love to imitate this call, for somewhat unclear purposes: I’ve seen them give a red-tail scream, seemingly causing small bird to scatter, before flying up to a feeding station, and I’ve seen them do it in the middle of a territorial squabble with a scrub-jay, perhaps as a general expression of aggression. I suppose that if you are looking for an impressive vocal embodiment of determined anger and uncompromising antagonism, you could do worse.
The other prominent “imitation” of the red-tail scream is authored by human filmmakers. Among the various avian malapropisms of Hollywood that either frustrate or amuse alert birders, none is more notorious than the liberal sprinkling of red-tail screams in any scene calling for untamed, lonely desolation. It may be a night scene; there may be eagles on the screen; but the usual sound you will hear is the inarticulately expressive outpouring of wildness of the red-tailed hawk. (Unless Conan O’Brien’s eagle has been finding more employment than I realized.)
Inarticulate in the sense that it is not like the varied vocabulary of the titmouse, suggestive of human speech in its clear diversity of sounds to express different meanings. The stereotypical caveman is inarticulate in his limited repertoire of grunts, shouts, and snurkles. Similarly, we are generally unable to pick up much nuance and variety in red-tail screams. And yet at the same time, it’s a sound that is incredibly expressive of a certain character (unmistakably raptoreal, fearlessly loud) and setting (the unbounded broadcasting of a free-soaring bird). Wild liberty, lack of fearfulness and timidity, size and strength: all of these are successfully communicated to human ears by this sound, and all of them are true inferences.
Conclusion: what but fear winged the birds?
We come back to this: many people are drawn to red-tailed hawks and other raptors because of the impression we receive of strength, fearlessness, freedom, sometimes extended by human tradition to a broader but somewhat amorphous “nobility” of some kind. Some of this is due to the true facts of their natural history (they are strong, they do have few predators and hence less fear and timidity), some due to visual or auditory impressions (big eyes and loud screams feel imposing to people), and some due to the accumulated cultural history of past millenia.
At the same time, there is an counterbalancing vein of sentiment, often latent or present to some degree throughout much of human history, but perhaps given more expression now than at any previous time, that killing animals “is not good.” If you feel it is bad for people to kill animals, does that make it harder to admire raptors for their proficient dealing of death? Some people feel this way, usually not blaming the hawks in an ethical sense, since they have really no practical alternative to hunting to survive, but still emotionally reluctant to actively celebrate their bloodthirsty side.
Definitive answers to ethical questions are often difficult and there are myriad defensible sub-positions in the world of animal rights and appropriate human behavior. I am not going to take on that big and thorny area. But when it comes to the natural world, it is nearly impossible to take in the full glory of existence without accepting the role of predators, who are everywhere. A great number of animals eat other animals: a hawk might eat a mockingbird, a jay might eat a finch, a chickadee might eat a caterpillar. And even the herbivores are what they are today because of their long evolution alongside those who wanted to eat them (which could be said of humans as well):
What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear winged the birds, and hunger
Jeweled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?
– Robinson Jeffers, “The Bloody Sire”
Now, Jeffers is admittedly a rather hard-hearted poet and the biggest raptor-booster in the history of literature (there’s a reason he comes up three times in this hawk essay), who wrote the most humanly unsympathetic condolence card ever penned to an injured red-tail in “Hurt Hawks”:
I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery.
But his basic evolutionary biology, while poetically simplified, is fundamentally sound: of the forces guiding evolution into those diverse animal forms which we admire for swiftness and agility, power and keen-sightedness, the ever-ongoing competition between predators and prey is perhaps the most important. In this broad sense, if you want to fully appreciate the physical form, methods of survival, and fundamental essence of any animal, you have to accept the role of hawks and other predators in the long push-and-pull of evolution.
An allied, famous, and slightly more measured defense of predators is Aldo Leopold’s famous statement on wolves:
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
– “Thinking like a mountain,” in A Sand County Almanac
Leopold’s case is bolstered by his ecological observations: without natural predation by wolves, deer populations exploded, dramatically changing the plant communities through their unrestrained feeding. Similar patterns of simply functional consequences of disturbing the prey-predator balance can be observed in some cases with hawks, where the historically common practice of shooting them (often justified as a protection of chickens), for example, ended up being counterproductive when rodent populations then increased, with a larger detrimental impact on agricultural operations. But Leopold’s argument is wider and deeper. He continues:
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.
Both Jeffers and Leopold know enough of ecology to realize that if you take the wolves and hawks out of the web of nature, the fruitful balance that produced the world we love will be lost. Both Jeffers and Leopold know enough of human needs to see that if you take the wolves and hawks out of our experience of the world, it becomes tamer and duller, less wild and alive.
Here in our civilized corner of coastal California, we no longer hear the howls of wolves, the grizzlies are long gone, and mountain lions are furtive and rarely seen. If we look then for embodiments of that surviving wildness, for the sense of danger that wards off the monotony of long life and excessive safety, the red-tailed hawk is now its prime prophet. There is a voice that falls from the sky, speaking the testament of the untamed.
Header photo: Red-tailed Hawk by Becky Matsubara.
Remarkable & wonder-ful…thank you, Jack!
Enjoyed this Jack. Thank you so much- Terry G
Thanks Terry and Chris! I’m glad you liked it!