Hawk Identification: North American Hawks by Shape

Name the group before you name the species: a hawk with broad wings and a short, fanned tail is a buteo, and a hawk with short rounded wings and a long tail is an accipiter. Audubon's introduction to identifying raptors in flight makes the same point, and recommends learning the Red-tailed Hawk thoroughly first, then measuring every other bird against it.

That one split settles most photographs. A big bird circling over a highway on flat, plank-like wings is a buteo, and in most of the country that means a Red-tailed Hawk. A crow-sized bird that crosses your yard with several quick flaps and a short glide, then vanishes into a hedge, is an accipiter. Everything after that is detail.

Six buteos account for nearly every large soaring hawk people photograph in the United States.

• [Red-tailed Hawk](/lookup/ducks-and-raptors/red-tailed-hawk): east of the Mississippi most birds show a white chest and a dark band of streaks across the belly; adults have a reddish-brown tail. Western birds run from pale to rust-brown to blackish.
• [Red-shouldered Hawk](/lookup/ducks-and-raptors/red-shouldered-hawk): narrow black and white bands on the flight feathers of the wings and tail, reddish shoulders and chest, and a pale crescent near the wingtip in flight. Its shrill kee-yeeear drops in pitch, and Blue Jays copy it.
• [Broad-winged Hawk](/lookup/ducks-and-raptors/broad-winged-hawk): crow-sized at 13-17 in, with broad tail bands and wings that look pale below with dark tips and a dark trailing edge.
• Swainson's Hawk: a western grassland bird, 18-22 in, with white wing linings against dark flight feathers and a narrow brown chest band between a white throat and a white belly.
• Rough-legged Hawk: an Arctic breeder that winters in open country, showing a blackish patch at the wrist and a tail that is white at the base with dark banding at the tip. It hovers over fields, which few buteos do.
• Ferruginous Hawk: the largest of the group, pale, with rufous shoulders and thigh feathers and a whitish tail washed with rufous toward the tip.

Two accipiters are common across most of the country, and they are the reason hawk identification has a reputation for being hard.

Cooper's Hawk is the larger of the two, with a relatively bigger head, a longer tail and thicker legs, a rounded tail tip and a wider white band at the tail's end. Audubon gives females 17-18 in and males 15-16 in. Sharp-shinned Hawk runs 10-14 in, with a squared-off tail tip, a small head and pencil-thin legs.

The trap is that a female Sharp-shinned approaches a male Cooper's in size, so size alone decides nothing. Use the tail tip and the head. In flight, a Cooper's head projects well in front of the wings; a Sharp-shinned's small head sits in the notch between them.

Both hunt the same way: stealthily through dense cover, then a burst of speed. Adults of both are blue-gray above and pale reddish below, and juveniles of both are brown above with streaked underparts, which is why so many backyard photographs stall at this pair.

• [Northern Harrier](/lookup/ducks-and-raptors/northern-harrier): a white rump patch, an owl-like face, and a shallow V held over fields. Males are gray, females and juveniles brown. Audubon notes it may rely on keen hearing, not only sight, to locate prey.
• [American Kestrel](/lookup/ducks-and-raptors/american-kestrel): the smallest falcon in North America, with two sharp stripes on the face. Males have a red-brown back against blue-gray wings; females are red-brown above with narrow dark bars. It hovers over fields when there is nothing to perch on.
• [Osprey](/lookup/ducks-and-raptors/osprey): a fish-eater with long crooked wings, almost always over water.
• [Turkey Vulture](/lookup/ducks-and-raptors/turkey-vulture): very large, small-headed, soaring in a shallow V with a two-toned underwing, black linings against gray flight feathers. Adults have red heads, juveniles gray.

If the bird is soaring in a V and rocking from side to side, stop looking for a hawk: that is a Turkey Vulture.

In almost all these species the female is noticeably larger than the male. Audubon gives female Red-tailed Hawks 19-26 in and males 17-22 in; female Rough-legged Hawks 20-23 in and males 18-21 in; female Cooper's Hawks 17-18 in and males 15-16 in. A large female of a small species and a small male of a large species can look the same through a phone screen.

So do not judge a lone bird against the sky. Judge it against something: a crow that mobs it, a gull beside it on a mudflat, the fence post it is sitting on. Audubon compares both Cooper's Hawk and Broad-winged Hawk to a crow, which tells you how little room for error there is.

Season and place remove more candidates than plumage does. A Broad-winged Hawk in the eastern United States in January is very unlikely, because most of them winter in South America.

Expose for the bird, not for the sky, or you will get a silhouette with no pattern. Take a burst as the bird banks: the tail shape, the wing outline and the underwing pattern each show for only part of a turn. For a perched bird get the head, chest and tail in one frame, then take a second frame with something recognizable beside it for scale.

The marks worth having in focus are the tail tip, the head projection, the belly pattern and the trailing edge of the wing. Photograph it and the app identifies it; these pages are how you check the answer against the look-alike.

When you compare your picture with hawk identification photos, look for one deciding mark per species rather than the overall color, which varies. From Audubon's field guide:

• Red-tailed Hawk (17-26 in): adults have a tail reddish above and whitish below. Eastern birds show a white chest and a dark belly-band of streaks; western birds range from pale to rust-brown to blackish. Overhead, the leading edge of the inner wing looks dark.
• Red-shouldered Hawk (16-24 in): narrow black and white bands on the wing and tail feathers, reddish shoulders and chest, and in flight a pale crescent near each wingtip.
• Broad-winged Hawk (13-17 in): broad dark bands on the tail and pale underwings with dark tips and trailing edges. Juveniles have narrow tail bands with a thicker last band. It migrates in flocks called kettles.
• Swainson's Hawk (18-22 in): a two-toned underwing, white linings against dark flight feathers, and a brown chest band between a white throat and white belly. A western bird.
• Rough-legged Hawk (18-23 in): feathering down the legs to the toes, a blackish patch at the wrist, and a white tail base with dark banding near the tip. It hovers over fields and comes south from the Arctic in winter.
• Cooper's and Sharp-shinned Hawks: see the Cooper's Hawk and Sharp-shinned Hawk pages; tail tip shape is the mark.

Watch for oddities too. Birds & Blooms' reader gallery includes a leucistic Red-tailed Hawk that looks almost white, so a pale hawk is not always a rare species.

• HawkWatch International's Raptor ID app: nearly 1,000 annotated photos and identification videos for 34 North American raptors, plus an Ask an Expert form for your own photos or videos.
• Audubon's online field guide: species pages with size, description and similar species, used for the marks above.
• Birds & Blooms' pictures of hawks: a reader-photo gallery of nine species including Osprey, Red-tailed, Red-shouldered, Swainson's, Sharp-shinned, Ferruginous, Cooper's and Broad-winged Hawks. The captions give few field marks, so use it to see how hawks look in ordinary backyard light, then confirm with a field guide.

BirdLens suggests the species from your own photo. A side-on perched shot plus one of the tail spread gives the clearest result.