Wings on the River: Hawk-dots

“Three shrikes and you’re out!” my friend yells.

Many of these species migrate here in winter, to clean out our mice and squirrels and such, as northern nesting grounds freeze.

Red-tailed, my most common hawk, lives year-round in open savannah, fields and forests. Most Red-tails are red-tailed, but some are white- or brown-tailed. Most show a brown head and big black stripe across the breast — their most reliable field mark, I find. After a while, their delicate shape — curvy wings, tiny head, broad round tail — becomes so familiar, you can pick out new species by looking for hawks that aren’t shaped like red-tails.

Red-tails love ground squirrels for lunch. Lots of rural farmers and property owners dislike squirrels — a happy disagreement.

Shape and flight pattern also help ID hawks at a distance, more so than color.

Rough-legged Hawks, visiting only in winter, have distinctive black bellies and elbow patches; they’re also the only big hawk that often hovers, even in still air; and unlike red-tails, they often perch daintily on small twigs.

It’s unbelievable, seeing this pumpkin-sized foot-high featherball floating in space, feet delicately clutched onto a flimsy spray of dogwood twigs. I don’t know how they do it. Do they have actual anti-gravity skills? Like Chinese drama heroes?

I love seeing hawks, knowing it means the old connection between seedy fields, munching mice, and pest-hunting aerial migrants still endures.

Pesticides and habitat threaten it in places. Every time a weed or pest gets resistant to pesticides, the chemicals get stronger, concentrated in the remaining weeds, which get eaten by the remaining animals, who accumulate even more poison in their bodies; hawks, kestrels and shrikes eat the muddled survivors, and can get a massive dose. Water washes the poisons into aquatic food webs, too. Sparrows eat pesticide-treated seeds.

This is how DDT, an outlawed pesticide, almost wiped out Bald Eagles, Osprey and other birds. DDT-poisoned birds lay eggshells so thin, they break under a parent bird’s brooding weight.

Old news, you say! We learned about DDT — and now, it’s illegal (though some countries still need it for malaria control).

Our very own American pesticides are still causing ecological collapse, though; with their use, insect populations are crashing so fast scientists struggle to document the loss, and insect-eating songbird populations are following their food source downward.

It’s just one thing after another, isn’t it?

So, I loved yelling “hawk on a stick!” to my friend the other day; seeing the silhouette of a big raptor skim overhead, their crop visibly bulging with food; spotting my first Prairie Falcon; counting shrikes on back roads — I’m up to two, I just need one more and I can steal that joke!