The Hawk That Keeps Visiting

The hawk taking birds at a feeder is a different sort of hawk from the one circling over a highway, and the confusion between them is nearly universal.

Two body plans

Accipiters — Cooper's and sharp-shinned — have short rounded wings and long tails, built for fast pursuit through trees. They hunt birds, and they are the ones that appear at feeders.

Buteos — red-tailed and its relatives — have broad wings and short fanned tails, built for soaring. They hunt rodents in open country and perch on poles along roads. A red-tailed hawk at a feeder is uncommon.

That division is the useful one, and it can be made at a distance from shape alone.

Cooper's versus sharp-shinned

The hardest common raptor pair in North America, and honest birders leave many unidentified.

A Cooper's hawk is crow-sized, with a rounded tail tip, a proportionally large head that projects well beyond the leading edge of the wings in flight, and a capped appearance from a dark crown contrasting with a paler nape.

A sharp-shinned hawk is jay-sized, with a squared or notched tail tip, a small head that barely projects, and a hooded look with no contrast between crown and nape.

The problem is that a large female sharp-shinned overlaps in size with a small male Cooper's, so size alone settles nothing. Tail shape and head projection are the features worth photographing.

Juveniles

Both species are brown above with brown streaking below as juveniles, rather than the blue-grey back and rufous barring of the adult.

That accounts for a large share of confused reports, since the bird in the garden in autumn is often a young one that matches no illustration in the guide's main plate.

Red-tailed hawks

The default large hawk of open country. Broad-winged, heavy, with a pale chest, a dark belly band, and — in adults — a rusty tail that is genuinely obvious in good light.

Most hawks perched on a lamppost along a road are this species. Juveniles have a brown banded tail, which is another reason a familiar bird looks unfamiliar in autumn.

Vultures, mistaken constantly

Turkey vultures soar with wings held in a shallow V and rock from side to side, with a small featherless head that looks disproportionately tiny.

Anything soaring in a stable flat plane with a visible head is a hawk. The tilting V is diagnostic and visible far beyond the range at which colours can be judged.

What to do about it

Nothing, mostly. A hawk taking birds at a feeder is doing what hawks do, and the feeder concentrated the prey — a point covered in a hawk at my feeder.

Taking the feeders down for a week or two moves the birds on and the hawk follows them. Providing dense cover nearby gives small birds somewhere to escape to, which is a better long-term arrangement than an open feeding station with nothing within reach.

Photographing them

For a raptor, the useful shots are the spread tail and the underwing, not the perched profile most people take.

A perched bird from the front gives very little. A single frame of the bird leaving, showing tail shape and head projection, frequently settles what an hour of watching could not.