The Hawk Itself

OF ALL OUR HAWKS, the mighty red-tailed hawk is the one perhaps most familiar to those who have noticed a broad-winged, fan-tailed bird soaring lazily overhead on a breezy summer day. In the dead of winter, that same light-chested, motionless object can be seen perched atop a lonely tree snag, patiently scanning the surrounding fields with eyes so keen that they can detect the fleeting scurry of a meadow mouse a hundred yards away.

The range of the red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis, is quite extensive and covers much of North America, from coast to coast and from Alaska to the Dominican Republic. In the United States, one may expect to find it the year round, both as a breeding bird and as a winter resident.
Young red-tails are strongly migratory during their first year. Some adults are migratory and travel great distances, as do birds hatched within the year. Others remain within the boundaries of a well-defined territory at all seasons. These individuals are mates for life and it is only upon the death of one of the pair that the survivor will take a new mate.

These pairs, which will be referred to as stable pairs throughout this text, occupy the choicest territories to be found, generally wild wooded areas that have yet to be altered by power shovels and bulldozers. These pairs are the nucleus of the species. If in the wake of our ever-exploding civilization we cannot somehow manage to save enough acreage to sustain a satisfactory number of stable pairs, the extirpation of red-tails from vast sections of their present range is inevitable.

Even today, as its numbers steadily decline, many of us are naive enough to take the red-tail for granted. The species itself appears sufficiently adaptable to escape total extermination in the future, but its numbers will continue to decline as our own population increases. The day is fast approaching when the red-tail will be absent from the daily check lists of amateur bird watchers.