Description
A red-tailed hawk on a mossy stump with both wings raised and spread, lit from behind by a sky full of gold, looking directly into the lens. Every feather in the wing is separated and translucent where the low sun comes through it.
The posture is doing one of several jobs, and you cannot always tell which from a single frame. A hawk holds its wings out like this to steady itself in the moment after landing on an awkward perch; to mantle, hiding food beneath itself from anything that might come to steal it; and simply to sun — spreading the wings to warm the feathers and drive out parasites. Whatever the reason, it produced the most theatrical two seconds of the evening.
Since the wings are the whole picture here, it is worth knowing something about how a hawk maintains them. Feathers wear out, and every bird has to replace them — but a duck can afford to molt its flight feathers all 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 entire process, which takes months and may not finish in a single season. The wing in this photograph is a work in progress that is never allowed to stop working — maintenance performed on a running engine.
And if you ever see two of them together in early spring, watch: red-tailed hawks court in the air, circling together and then diving and climbing in a long undulating chase, occasionally gripping talons and tumbling down before breaking apart. They hold their territory and their partner for years.
This is a high-resolution digital download of the photograph, made in Oregon — yours to print for your home or office, set as a wallpaper, or simply keep. The wide crop and the backlighting make this the most dramatic image in the raptor collection, and the one I would put on a large wall.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 4224 × 2336 pixels in a wide crop — sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 14 × 8 inches at 300 DPI, and considerably larger for wall display. Delivered as an instant download the moment your order is complete.
License: Personal use only. Print it for your own home, use it as a wallpaper or screen background, enjoy it yourself. Not licensed for commercial use, resale, redistribution, or AI training. © Jonathan Swanson / JonSwan Productions. All rights reserved.