Four Feathers Studio

So, I’d like to start off with a disclaimer, in that I’m 95% sure the hawk in this photo is indeed a Broad-winged Hawk. I spent many hours on Cornell Lab’s All About Birds website (their app Merlin is also amazing!), utilizing their incredible database and bird ID tips and tools. You can view similar species side by side while reading tips to help you compare and contrast distinguishing features. Between feather color and pattern and tail length—the hawk in my photograph has a much shorter tail compared to the Sharp-shinned or Cooper’s Hawk—I am fairly confident March’s featured bird must be a Broad-winged hawk.

 

I have seen, heard and photographed Sharp-shinned, Red-tailed, and Broad-winged hawks in Wonderland, but Broad-winged Hawks seem to frequent the yard and its feeders most often. Yes, when you put out seed and suet to feed the songbirds, you inadvertently feed the big birds as well. The Broad-winged hawks I have photographed have been very tolerant of me and my camera, and I have been able to be fairly close by and keep company with them while they preen or assess meal options. They often perch in a wild cherry tree in the left side-yard, which almost always elicits an alarm call from my indoor bird, Edwin, a cockatiel who has a sharp stink-eye for anything large in flight that goes past his window. But in this particular story, the hawk was in the patch of apple trees found in the righthand side of the yard, on the edge of the field. The photograph was taken around 7:30 in the morning, early September 2022, while I was out and about in Wonderland looking for Fall warbler arrivals. No doubt the Broad-winged Hawk was also looking for the new fall arrivals or perhaps just waiting for the slow and lumbering mourning doves that gather beneath the feeder. Either way, I was quite surprised to see the hawk sitting on the branch before me when I stopped to look up into the apple trees. The hawk was gracious enough to let me recover my senses and quickly take a couple of photographs before they moved on to find breakfast.

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I want to share another quick little story about a different hawk in the same apple tree that happened just the other day. "Second verse same as the first”: it was an early September morning, and I was standing under the apple tree, looking for fall warblers, when I saw a hawk flying right towards me. As it approached, it dipped in flight to go under a branch and land, but it hit its head on the branch by accident (I don’t think they'd seen me at that point.) The hawk quickly recovered enough to stay airborne and land on another branch—inches from my head! Staring into each other's eyes, both frozen still and not wanting to move, I could feel us both trying to assess what the heck had just happened and who exactly was in front of us. I was immediately struck by its small size, and along with its bluish-grey upperparts and long tail, I was (slightly) confident I was looking into the eyes of a Sharp-shinned hawk. We continued like this for about twenty seconds or so before I inevitably blinked or moved just enough to give myself away as something more than a weirdly shaped tree. It was one of the craziest encounters I have ever had in Wonderland, mostly for its element of surprise and mutual WTF moment.