Birder’s Lounge

Tales of a Red-tailed Hawk

This young Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) was intently staring into the brush when my parents and I came upon it. My parents have been trying to get me to go for a walk in their neighborhood park for quite some time. I’m always going here or there, looking for birds and other wildlife in parks, sanctuaries, and refuges. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to be impressed with the birding - but I was.

My mom spotted the hawk first, and it conveniently ignored us so that we could watch it for a good half-hour. My dad stealthily circled around in a wide arc to see it from the other side. I almost always go birding alone. I recently found a poem by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), called Solitariness. An excerpt:

O sweet woods, the delight of solitariness!
O, how much I do like your solitariness!
…Sweet birds kindly do grant harmony unto thee;
Fair trees’ shade is enough fortification,
Nor danger to thyself if be not in thyself.
…¹

I understand what Sir Sidney is saying, and I’ll bet many of you have felt the peace of a quiet moment, alone in the woods.

But on this day, it was nice to share the excitement of seeing a handsome hawk with my own parents, right there with me.

Gorrrrgeous!

The Red-tailed Hawk populations in North America are very healthy, as you can see from the distribution map below:

U.S. States and Canadian Provinces

NOTE: The maps for birds represent the breeding status by state and province. In some jurisdictions, the subnational statuses for common species have not been assessed and the status is shown as not-assessed (SNR). In some jurisdictions, the subnational status refers to the status as a non-breeder; these errors will be corrected in future versions of these maps. A species is not shown in a jurisdiction if it is not known to breed in the jurisdiction or if it occurs only accidentally or casually in the jurisdiction. Thus, the species may occur in a jurisdiction as a seasonal non-breeding resident or as a migratory transient but this will not be indicated on these maps. See other maps on this web site that depict the Western Hemisphere ranges of these species at all seasons of the year.²

My high-school boyfriend trained with a master falconer, took and passed his test, and soon began hunting rabbits with his Red-tailed Hawk. “Falconry” is also known as the Sport of Kings, which anyone who has ever been to a Renaissance festival has undoubtedly seen. He and his family went on vacation once, and I fed his hawk. What do you feed a hawk when it cannot catch its own food? Frozen.Dead.Chicks. EeeYUCK! That was a million years ago, but I remember being awed by the magnificence of these birds. I’ve found a recent article written about the sport of falconry, and it covers the controversial aspects of it pretty well. It is an interesting read, especially if you are a birder and don’t know much about falconry.

These two photos do more than capture the hawk scratching his head. Can you spot something else? The first picture shows the hawk’s raised nictitating membrane, while the second photo shows the unshielded eye.

This hawk finally found a meal, and we walked on to enjoy the rest of the day at the park.

Six Centuries of Great Poetry, R. Warren and A. Erskine, Editors, 1955 ↩
Citation for data on website including Watershed and State Distribution maps: NatureServe. 2008. NatureServe Explorer: An online encyclopedia of life (web application). Version 7.0. NatureServe, Arlington, Virginia. Available http://www.natureserve.org/explorer. (Accessed: November 19, 2008 ). ↩