Last week in this space we mentioned how we had recently counted 17 hawks on a drive from Avon to Dansville. That led us into talking about the hawks commonly found in our area, specifically the four “class-by-themselves” birds – the osprey, the turkey vulture, the bald eagle, and the northern harrier.
*The rest of the raptors (or hawks) in our area fall into three large groups: falcons, accipiters, and buteos.
*FALCONS generally have long tails and long pointed wings. They flap those wings frequently and rapidly, and they’re pretty much the speed kings of the bird world, especially when diving (“stooping”) onto prey.
*Drive around for an hour or so and you’ll see several falcons, though you might not notice. The AMERICAN KESTREL (“sparrow hawk”) is a pigeon-sized bird, often perched on utility lines mixed in with (and unnoticed among) mourning doves. It’s been described as a linebacker, with shoulders very broad in proportion to its head. Unsurprisingly it takes small prey… sometimes small birds, but mostly insects and rodents.
*Another falcon we see occasionally is the crow-sized PERGERINE (“duck hawk”). I once met one outside Corning library, where it had just come to earth on a green patch. Another flew right past me at shoulder height as we both traveled a dirt road in Finger Lakes National Forest. These birds like to make their nests in cliffs. City skyscrapers often provide them with homes nowadays, and if you scout around on the internet you can find nest-cams showing their family life as it unfolds.
*BUTEOS are a group with generally broad wings and short rounded tails. In flight they’ll often take a flap and glide, take a flap and glide, take a flap and glide. The RED-TAILED HAWK is perhaps the easiest to identify. It runs about two foot from nose to tail, and the upper side of the adult’s tail is, in fact, red. If the sun shines through, you can even see it from the underside.
*The crow-sized BROAD-WINGED HAWK is very common, with a conspicuously banded tail. The RED-SHOULDERED HAWK is a bit bigger, also with a banded tail but the tail’s a little longer. It does indeed have reddish “shoulders” on its wings, but they’re not always easy to spot.
*ACCIPITERS as a group have long tails and rounded wings. Their flight pattern is often to take two or three flaps and then coast, and they’re often found in woods, where those long tails lend them maneuverability through the branches. The SHARP-SHINNED HAWK runs either side of a foot in length, while the COOPER’S HAWK is not quite half again as large. On the underside both birds have tail banding, and also nice horizontal banding or streaking on the breast.
*Gone, we hope, are the bad old days of hawk pie, annual hawk slaughters along the migration routes, and hawks routinely killed around farmyards. Yes, occasionally hawks do make incursions onto hen runs, and once in a while a sharpshin, a Cooper’s or a kestrel slams down among songbirds at the feeder. (There’s no such thing as a “chicken hawk,” except that ANY hawk was considered a dire threat in days gone by.) But they take far, far more in insects, rodents, and carrion. All in all, the hawks are on our side.