The Hawks of Portland

Portland has more hawks in it than almost anybody notices, and they fall into two completely different kinds of bird that happen to share a name. Learn to tell those two apart and the whole city reorganizes itself. One kind is loitering above the freeway. The other one is behind your house, hunting your bird feeder.

Everything below was photographed here in Oregon — Oaks Bottom, Sellwood Park, and along the river.

🪶 There’s a quiz at the end — ten questions on what’s below. Jump to the quiz →

Two Kinds of Hawks

Here is the single most useful thing in this post, and it takes about a minute to learn.

Buteos have long broad wings and a short fanned tail. They soar. They hang on rising air above open ground and wait for something to move a long way below. The red-tailed hawk is the buteo everyone in North America has seen, whether they knew it or not.

Accipiters have short rounded wings and a long tail they use as a rudder. They do not soar and wait. They ambush, and then they chase — through hedges, around trunks, under fences, after other birds. The Cooper’s hawk is the accipiter in your neighborhood.

Same family, opposite problems, opposite airframes. Once you have that, you can identify most of what flies over Portland from a moving car.

And a small piece of trivia that reveals how arbitrary the word “hawk” really is: in Britain, hawk means accipiter only. What Americans call a red-tailed hawk, a British birder would file alongside the buzzards. Meanwhile an American “buzzard” is a vulture, which is not a hawk at all. Nobody is wrong; the words simply grew up on different continents.

The Red-tailed Hawk

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Broad, long, blunt at the tip. A wing like that will hold a heavy bird up on rising air with almost no effort, and a red-tailed hawk can circle a thermal for an hour barely flapping — riding a column of warm air up, gliding off it, finding the next one. It is why they are the hawk you see over every highway. They are not patrolling so much as loitering, extremely cheaply, waiting.

The freeway thing is not an accident either. Mow the verge of a road and you have built a long, thin, permanent grassland, which is excellent vole habitat, edged by tall poles and light standards for perching. We accidentally constructed thousands of miles of ideal red-tailed hawk territory and then wondered why they sit and watch the traffic.

Watch the head in a photograph like this. It is perfectly level and perfectly still while everything else about the bird is moving. Raptors stabilize their heads with remarkable precision in flight — the body rolls and pitches underneath, the eyes stay locked on the target. Camera engineers built motorized gimbals to do that job. This one came standard.

The two field marks that actually work

The red tail is the worst way to identify a red-tailed hawk, because you cannot see it from below and young birds do not have one. Use these instead.

The patagial bars. On the underwing, along the leading edge between the body and the wrist, there is a dark rectangular smudge on each side. Almost every red-tailed hawk has them and almost nothing else does. They are visible on a bird so high it is a speck, and if you learn one field mark from this post, learn this one.

The belly band. A horizontal band of dark streaking across an otherwise pale belly, like a dirty stripe worn around the middle. Not every bird has a strong one, but when it is there it confirms the identification instantly.

The species is also enormously variable — pale birds, dark chocolate birds, rusty birds, and regional forms that look like different species entirely. The bars and the band hold up across nearly all of it.

Landing

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Everything in that frame happens in under two seconds and every part of it is doing a job. The raised wings are not for lift — they are a deliberate stall, dumping airspeed. The fanned tail adds drag and holds the body angle. And the feet swing forward at the last moment because a hawk lands with its landing gear, taking the impact through the legs rather than the chest.

Look at the tail: pale and finely banded, not brick red. That makes this a juvenile — red-tailed hawks do not grow into the red tail until after their first year. So this is a young bird still flying the banded tail of its first season and still working out how much wing to give a landing. It is doing a creditable job.

That first year is brutally hard. A large majority of young red-tailed hawks do not survive it. Everything you are watching this bird do — judging the approach, dumping speed, getting the feet down cleanly — it is teaching itself, at speed, with no margin.

The Face

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That heavy bony shelf above the eye — the supraorbital ridge — is what gives every hawk its permanent glare, and it is not an expression at all. It is a built-in sunshade, keeping glare off the eye of an animal that spends its life looking down at bright open ground from height. Every raptor wears the same scowl for the same reason. They are equipped to see, not annoyed with you.

The eye itself gives you the age. A red-tailed hawk hatches with pale eyes — a light yellow-gray, like this one — and they darken over the first several years until an old adult looks out at you with eyes the color of strong coffee. Pale eye, young bird. Given the banded juvenile tail two photographs up, there is a fair chance this is the same hawk on a different day.

Behind that eye is roughly eight times your visual acuity. A red-tailed hawk circling at three hundred feet can pick out a vole moving in grass — not as a blur worth investigating, but resolved, identified, and worth the dive.

Wings Up

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A hawk holds its wings out like this for several different reasons and you cannot always tell which from one frame: steadying itself after landing on an awkward perch; mantling, which means hiding food underneath itself from anything that might come and steal it; or simply sunning, spreading the wings to warm the feathers and drive out parasites.

Since the wings are the whole photograph, here is something worth knowing about how a hawk maintains them. Feathers wear out and every bird has to replace them — but a duck can afford to molt all its flight feathers at once and spend a few flightless weeks hiding on the water. A hawk cannot. Everything it eats has to be caught in the air.

So raptors molt sequentially and symmetrically: a feather drops from one wing, the matching feather drops from the other, and the pair regrows before the next set goes. The bird stays balanced and stays flying through the whole process, which takes months and may not finish in a single season. That wing is a work in progress that is never permitted to stop working — maintenance performed on a running engine.

If you see two of them together in early spring, watch. Red-tailed hawks court in the air — circling together, then a long undulating chase of dives and climbs, occasionally gripping talons and tumbling down together before breaking apart. They hold their territory and their partner for years.

The Red-shouldered Hawk

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The name is unhelpful. The “red shoulder” is a patch of rufous on the upper wing that a perched bird usually keeps hidden — what you actually notice is the barred orange chest and those boldly checkered black-and-white wings.

He is a buteo like the red-tailed hawk, but a slimmer and more elegant one, built for hunting from a perch over wet woodland rather than soaring over open fields. Frogs, snakes, crayfish, voles, the occasional small bird — anything that moves in a flooded wood. Which makes Oaks Bottom close to ideal.

And it makes this bird worth reporting. Red-shouldered hawks are recent arrivals in Oregon. Their historic western range ran through California, and over the last few decades they have pushed steadily north into Oregon and now Washington. This is a species in the middle of expanding its range, and you are watching it happen.

Two more things. His call — a ringing, repeated kee-ah, kee-ah — is one of the most recognizable sounds in a wet forest, and also one of the most counterfeited: blue jays imitate it with real accuracy, apparently to clear other birds off a feeder. If you hear a red-shouldered hawk and then find a jay, you have been had.

And he shares this wood with the barred owls. The two species want the same flooded timber and much of the same prey, one working the day shift and one the night, and where their territories overlap they harass each other at the boundary. The refuge is smaller than it looks. The owls are here →

The Cooper’s Hawk

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This is the other kind of hawk. Short rounded wings, long rudder of a tail, and the agility to fold through a thicket at full speed after another bird. An accipiter does not loiter on a thermal. It waits in cover, then commits to a chase.

What you feel in a portrait like this is the eyes. A raptor’s eyes sit almost fixed in their sockets — they barely move — so to study something the bird turns its entire head and holds you in that level stare. It reads as curiosity. It is also a predator taking your measure.

That hunting style has a documented cost. When researchers examined Cooper’s hawk skeletons, a startling share carried healed fractures in the bones of the chest — injuries from hitting branches at full speed while running down a songbird. They break themselves fairly regularly, mend, and go straight back to doing it.

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Everything about this one marks it as a juvenile. An adult Cooper’s hawk is slate blue-gray across the back with warm rufous barring running horizontally across the chest and a deep red eye. The young wear brown with vertical streaks and pale yellow eyes, and it takes a couple of years to trade one uniform for the other. Horizontal bars, adult; vertical streaks, young bird. That rule works on the whole group.

This is also the hawk most people actually meet. If something is picking birds off your feeder, it is almost certainly a Cooper’s. They moved into cities enthusiastically, because we helpfully installed thousands of small feeding stations that concentrate their prey out in the open. It is not a malfunction of your yard. It is a food chain arriving in full. If it bothers you, take the feeder down for a week or two and the hawk moves along.

Cooper’s or sharp-shinned? The hard one.

Honest warning: this is one of the genuinely difficult identifications in North American birding, and experienced birders leave birds unnamed. Three things help.

The tail tip. A Cooper’s tail is rounded, with the outer feathers shorter than the middle ones. A sharp-shinned tail is square or even notched. This is the best single clue, and it is easiest on a perched bird or a good flight photograph.

Head projection in flight. A Cooper’s leads with its head, so the neck and head stick out well ahead of the wings. A sharp-shinned looks almost headless, with the wrists pushed forward past the face.

Not size. Size is a trap, and here is why. In raptors the female is substantially larger than the male — sometimes a third heavier. That is backwards from most birds and it is consistent across hawks, falcons, eagles and owls. Nobody is entirely certain why; it may let a pair take different prey and share a territory without competing. The practical consequence is unavoidable: a big female sharp-shinned hawk and a small male Cooper’s hawk overlap almost completely in size. Judge shape, not scale.

A Note on the Voice

One last thing, because it is my favorite piece of hawk trivia. That piercing scream that plays over every soaring bald eagle in every film you have ever watched? It is a red-tailed hawk. Hollywood decided long ago that the bald eagle’s actual squeaky chitter would not do, and dubbed this bird in instead.

The eagle got the fame. The red-tail did the voice work. It is not the only thing the eagles take credit for around here — ask an osprey about the fish tax →

Still to Come

The falcons are a separate matter entirely — a different lineage that only looks like a hawk, and, as it happens, more closely related to parrots and songbirds than to anything on this page. I have a kestrel and a peregrine to sort through, and they will get their own post. The turkey vulture will get one too. A merlin I do not have — I thought I did for a while, and that turned out to be a juvenile Cooper’s hawk.

Quiz: Ten Questions on Hawks