The first bird Tom and I saw for the Christmas Bird Count this year was a bedraggled Red-tailed Hawk, hunched over at the top of a large tree off County 9. It looked miserable in the rain. Its head feathers were wet and ruffled.
The Red-tailed Hawk is one of the most common raptors in North America, indeed, world-wide. Occupying a wide-range of habitats, it can be found from West Coast to East Coast, from the high Arctic to as far south as Panama. In Minnesota, too, its range includes the entire state, where it is considered a summer resident.
Its vast range has resulted in twelve subspecies with varying plumages. This variety means that identifying a Red-tailed Hawk might be harder than you’d expect. The red tail is the most reliable identifying mark, but it’s not always seen and can be toned down under certain lighting conditions. Immature red-tails have a barred tail and will not come into adult plumage until their second year. The eastern half of the continent, including Minnesota is home to the borealis subspecies—the hawk with which Minnesotans are most familiar. This morph also sports a brown“belly-band” on white breast feathers—but not always.
There is also a pale morph—T. S. Roberts calls it “albinistic–” Krideri — which is rarely seen, although Roberts includes the tidbit that in 1932, the Krider’s Hawk was the only morph of red-tail nesting in Jackson County on the Iowa border. Harlan’s Hawk, a subspecies in British Columbia and Alaska is very dark. It does not have the belly band. There are subspecies in northern Mexico and west of the Rockies, and intermediate morphs. The “subspecies” status means the different groups can interbreed and produce fertile offspring; the existence of the different morphs indicates there is not universal mixing of gene pools.
Having been humbled many times by incorrectly identifying a Red-tailed Hawk, I use characteristics in addition to coloration. Red-tails are big, the biggest buteo seen in Minnesota in the summer. They also have a tendency to glide in flight—steady, slow wingbeat, flap, flap, glide; flap, flap, glide. The birds also soar, rising on thermals high above the earth. In winter, this is the bird most often seen perched on lampposts along highways and freeways in the Metro area.
Wild River Audubon tallied 17 Red-tailed Hawks on the 2023 Christmas Bird Count. Tom and I saw five of them. We surmised that the warm weather and lack of snow cover caused the birds to stay in their familiar territory, where they can still hunt mice, rather than undertake the risk of migration. Even in normal winters, many red-tails in the southern half of Minnesota are known not to migrate.
Red-tailed Hawks build their nests about 30-50 feet off the ground in large trees. They use large sticks for the structure, and line it with pine needles and bark. They often will use a nest more than one breeding season. Great Horned Owls will frequently commandeer a red-tail nest for their own. The two species overlap ranges; there is intense competition for nest sites.
Writing in The Birds of Minnesota in 1932, Roberts took great pains to establish Red-tailed Hawks as a “beneficial” species. They had been targeted by “Hawk-killers” before the ecological role of predators was appreciated. They eat mostly small mammals, particularly mice. Nevertheless, by 1923, a driving trip from Minneapolis to Pipestone yielded no red-tails. In 1924, a trip from Minneapolis to the South Dakota border and north along the state line had only two.
With protection – they are covered under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918–and the passage of time, Red-tailed Hawks have regained their numbers. They are flexible nesters, but prefer the edges of fragmented forest habitat, of which our human species has produced many. Partners in Flight estimate a population size of two million over their entire range. It also estimated 34,000 red-tails in Minnesota, a fact that the recent breeding bird survey could not confirm.
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