Serious birders can look at a raptor and distinguish a Ferruginous Hawk from a Rough-legged Hawk or a Swanson’s Hawk. However, most of us never even heard of those birds and couldn’t care less how to tell them apart. But it would be nice to know what that raptor is in a tree along the highway or cruising past our bird feeder, or hovering over a field here in Tennessee.
So here is a quick and easy identification guide that will let you impress your friends and neighbors with you birds of prey identification abilities. Trust me; this is extremely easy, and accurate enough that you will usually be right. We will identify hawks by what you see them doing, and not by the number of color bands on their tail or some other hard to handle detail. I will only cover hawks today. We will get back to eagles, owls and vultures in some future article.
OK…so you are driving down interstate 40 and you see a large hawk sitting in a tree near the highway…what is it? It is almost certainly a Red-tailed Hawk. These are large hawks that eat mostly small rodents and they love the U.S. interstate highway system. They consider highways one long field with perfect mouse habitat. They also soar along the highways but you usually see them just sitting on a tree. When the sun is right you can definitely see the red tail on the adults. They are our most numerous hawks.
Now, you are driving down that same highway and you see a small hawk hovering in mid air and looking straight down into the field. That is an American Kestrel zeroing in on a mouse or even a grasshopper. They used to be called sparrow hawks because of their small size. They also often sit on telephone or power lines along the highway. Like the Red-tailed hawks, these guys thank President Eisenhower for the interstate highway system.
Now, it is a beautiful winter afternoon and you are relaxing in your house and watching all the little birds at you bird feeder. All of the sudden thirty birds explode into the air and head for cover as some hawk coming zooming through the yard and catches a dove that wasn’t paying attention. The hawk is either a Cooper’s hawk or a Sharp-shinned Hawk. These guys look almost identical, except for the slightly larger size of the Cooper’s hawk and both eat other birds for a living. Don’t worry about telling them apart; just know that they are one or the other. Once you become a serious birder you can worry about the differences. Lots of folks don’t like these guys because they eat the pretty little birds at the bird feeder. But remember, this is just nature doing its thing and hawks need to eat to survive too. You just happened to make it a little easier for the hawks by concentrating lots of tasty birds in one spot with your bird feeder.
If you are driving near the Tennessee River or a large lake and see a very large, mostly white bird (underneath) with a Zorro mask and a bad hair day, it is an osprey. (I stold this description from Lyn Bales of the IJams Nature Center.) These guys build giant stick nests in trees or platforms near water and eat almost exclusively fish. Ospreys dive into the water and catch fish in their talons. I have not seen any near the lakes in Fairfield Glade but you’ll certainly see them near the bigger rivers and lakes in east Tennessee.
That’s it! Now you are an expert in identifying our most common hawks . We also have Northern Harriers, Peregrine Falcons, Red-shouldered hawks, and a few more in the area, but they are much less common than the ones above. Nail the identification of the four hawks described above and you will enjoy nature and dazzle your friends even more than you do already.
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