Description
A red-tailed hawk head and shoulders, chin tucked, looking down the barrel of the lens with the background gone to warm bokeh. Streaked breast, heavy brow, dark hooked bill, and an expression that has ended a great many conversations between hawks and photographers.
Look at the eye, because it is telling you the bird’s age. A red-tailed hawk hatches with pale eyes — a light yellow-gray like this one — and they darken slowly 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 on the landing photograph elsewhere in this collection, there is a fair chance this is the same hawk, photographed on a different day.
Then there is the brow. That heavy bony shelf above each eye — the supraorbital ridge — is what gives every hawk its permanent glare, and it is not an expression at all. It is a sunshade, built in, 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.
Behind that eye is roughly eight times the visual acuity you have. A red-tailed hawk circling at three hundred feet can pick out a vole moving in grass — not as a blur to be investigated, but resolved, identified, and worth the dive.
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 square crop suits a square frame and makes an unusually strong small print.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 3200 × 3200 pixels — a true square, sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 10.5 inches on a side at 300 DPI, and 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.