Red-Tailed Hawk

Yes. It is also, despite being literally everywhere, one of the most consistently misidentified birds in North Louisiana — partly because it comes in enough color variations to confuse anyone who learned to ID it from a single photo, and partly because most people have never actually stopped to look at one. North Louisiana has several buteo species passing through or resident year-round, including red-shouldered hawks, broad-winged hawks, rough-legged hawks, and Swainson's hawks, but the red-tail is the one you will see most often by a margin that is not close.

It has mastered the art of living wherever humans have rearranged the landscape into open ground bordered by trees, which describes most of North Louisiana and, increasingly, most of everywhere.

Let's start with the obvious and then explain immediately why the obvious is going to let you down: the red tail. Adult red-tailed hawks have a tail that is a warm, cinnamon-brick red on the upper surface, usually with a thin dark band near the tip that looks like a designer label on an otherwise very expensive piece of luggage. When an adult red-tail soars overhead and banks in the light just right, that tail color is one of the most satisfying field marks in North American birding — distinctive, visible from a distance, and almost impossible to misread in good light. If you see that tail, you have your bird. Here is the problem: not all red-tailed hawks have red tails. Juveniles — birds in their first year, which make up a substantial proportion of the birds you'll encounter in any given season — have brown, banded tails with no red at all, which means the single most famous field mark of the species is absent on a significant portion of actual birds. You have to know what else to look for, and the what else is where it gets interesting. Juvenile red-tails have brown-streaked undersides and a dark belly band across the lower chest — a smudgy horizontal dark patch on an otherwise pale belly that looks like someone drew a line across the bird and walked away. They also have pale, almost whitish eyebrows that arch above the eye and give them the expression of someone who did their makeup with white eyeliner, decided it looked great, and committed completely. Not goths. Anti-goths. Wrong eyeliner, no regrets, extremely confident about it.

Osprey — This confusion only happens to beginners at a distance and in bad light, and only the one time, because after that the differences are permanent and obvious. Ospreys have that distinctive M-kinked wing shape in flight and are found over open water hunting fish. The osprey knows it's not a red-tail

Courtship, Nesting, and the Annual Real Estate Search

Red-tails court in the air because red-tails do most things in the air, with steep dives, spiraling climbs, and enough aerial drama to make most other raptors look underdressed for the occasion. The signature move involves the male and female locking talons in midair and spiraling downward together in a slow, falling rotation before separating just before the ground, which is either the most romantic thing two birds can do or a threat display that got complicated, depending on who's watching. Either way, it works.

The pair bond, after it's established, tends to hold for multiple seasons, with the same two birds returning to the same territory year after year with the reliability of people who found a good thing and aren't interested in the alternatives.

The nest is a statement. Red-tails return to the same nest site annually and add material each breeding season, so a nest that's been in continuous use for several years becomes a substantial platform — sticks and branches thirty to sixty feet up in a tall tree, lined with softer material, visible from a distance in winter when the leaves are down and suddenly obvious when you've been shown what to look for. These nests get used so long they become neighborhood landmarks. You've probably driven past the same red-tail nest on your route to wherever you go every Tuesday morning.

You just didn't know that's what it was.

In North Louisiana, eggs get laid between February and April, incubated by both parents for about a month. Chicks hatch covered in white down with those already-confident pale eyebrow expressions, looking from day one like they were born expecting to be accommodated. Dad hunts and delivers prey to the nest. Mom tears it into manageable pieces because red-tail chicks are not born knowing what to do with a whole vole and will stare at it with escalating concern if nobody explains the situation.

By about six weeks, the young birds are standing at the nest edge practicing wing flaps and looking at the air below them with the specific expression of someone standing at the edge of a diving board for the first time and reassessing their decisions.

Young birds leave the nest but stay in the parents' territory for several more weeks, following the adults around and continuing to beg for food with a high, thin, reedy call that sounds absolutely nothing like the famous scream and everything like an adolescent who has not yet found the right register for their adult persona. The parents reduce food deliveries gradually over these weeks, which from the juvenile's perspective is a betrayal and from the parents' perspective is the entire point.