The Great Redtail

The Red-tailed Hawk is a widely-known bird. A reminder of wildness.

Originally published January 22, 2021.

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These are all photos of Red-tailed Hawks. Over the years these birds have provided many photographic opportunities. This is more of a photo essay than usual. Caption for all: Red-tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis. Image: James Freitas.

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Chances are, you’ve seen a Red-tailed Hawk. Along the highway, in the park. When most people think “hawk,” the redtail is what they think of.

Burly with broad wings and a burnt-red tail, the hawk is unsubtle. Wherever it finds itself it survives. Its range is expansive and varied.

I once had the solemn opportunity to handle a dead Red-tailed Hawk. The bird felt as if it could become reanimated at any moment. I was surprised at my hesitance to touch it.

Lighter than expected, its feathers were intact. I extended a wing—a limp thing I’d often seen spread-out and soaring. Its talons were clean and sharp. I tested one against my fingernail—imagined prey it’d clutched.

The only part of the bird that looked definitively dead was its face. The bird’s eyes were gone.

A hawk has many distinct features; its essence is its eyes. A redtail’s “terrible eyes,” Robinson Jeffers described them. Walter Van Tilburg Clark called them “wide, alert and challenging.”

Holding the dead bird, I thought of one of Jeffers’s poems. The narrator shoots an injured hawk, not without trepidation:

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery

He shoots the hawk:

. . .What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

The redtail occupies a unique space. I’d sometimes call the Red-tailed Hawk the “common pigeon of great birds.”

Dark morph Red-tailed Hawk, Montana. Image: James Freitas.

I cringe at having put it that way. It sounds derisive. What I meant was the Red-tailed Hawk is a great bird you’re likely to brush shoulders with the way you would with a pigeon. They’re all over, recognizable. Their distinct field mark is in their name.

Commonness notwithstanding, they are great. We do not tire of them the way we tire of pigeons. Red-tailed Hawks are large, exciting, distinguished, beautiful. A “fierce rush” we can witness on a commute. The redtail bridges our world and a wild one.

We can lose touch with this wilder world. “Lose touch” is a hackneyed phrase in this context, but it’s true.

The hawk is a reminder. A gore-smeared beak on a low branch in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park forces us to recall the world is “intemperate and savage.” They can be right above us as we sit on a bench to drink iced coffee and eat a bagel.

As we go about our days, the hawk is an indifferent watcher observing us with “terrible eyes.” When I held that lifeless hawk, that “owl-downy” vessel from which fierceness vacated, the bird’s talons remained sharp enough to humble me.

Nothing about me is so sharp, so fierce. It is good to be humbled. The wild god of that world is not merciful “to the arrogant.” If the great redtail can be a source of humility, we are lucky these birds are so widespread.

On a walk through a nature sanctuary adjacent to town—church steeple and houses within view—a Red-tailed Hawk perched low in a tree. I stopped to take photos. It was a cold day; the hawk looked intense, in-tune.

Another walker came up. She asked if there was anything good.

“There’s a Red-tailed Hawk right there.”

The awe and excitement on the woman’s face was infectious. Even among church steeples, well-heated homes, we can find reminders of that wild world, intemperate and savage. We can thank the great redtail for that.

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