Hawk

A general name for medium-sized day-flying raptors — including the Cooper's, sharp-shinned, and red-tailed hawks of North America — built for speed in forest pursuit and for soaring on thermals.

Two distinct hawk types

In North American usage, “hawk” loosely covers two distinct genera:

Accipiters (forest hawks) — Cooper’s, sharp-shinned, goshawk. Short rounded wings + long tails for maneuverability. Hunt by ambushing songbirds in dense forest.
Buteos (broad-winged hawks) — red-tailed, red-shouldered, broad-winged. Broad wings + shorter tails for soaring on thermals. Hunt rodents in open country.

The distinction matters because the two types live differently — accipiters are forest specialists who rarely show themselves; buteos perch conspicuously on telephone poles and trees along highways.

Hollywood’s hawk voice

Almost every “eagle” or “hawk” call in American films and TV is the red-tailed hawk — a slow, descending “kreeeeer.” Even when bald eagles are shown, they’re typically dubbed with red-tail screams because eagles’ actual calls (a thin chittering) sound underwhelming.

The red-tailed hawk’s call has become the auditory shorthand for any large American bird of prey.

Suburban hawks

Several hawk species have adapted well to suburban and even urban environments:

Cooper’s hawks hunt birds at backyard feeders.
Red-tailed hawks nest on skyscrapers (Pale Male in New York City was famous through the 2000s).
Sharp-shinned hawks winter in subdivisions.

The expansion has been driven by suburban prey abundance (squirrels, songbirds at feeders, rabbits in gardens) and reduced persecution compared to mid-20th-century hunting.

Migration

Many hawk species are migratory, gathering at predictable migration corridors during fall:

Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania — North America’s most-watched hawk migration site.
Veracruz, Mexico — funnel point for millions of raptors heading from North to South America.
Eilat, Israel — bottleneck for European-African migration.

Counts at these sites have provided some of the longest-running data on raptor populations.

Family relations

Hawks, eagles, and Old World vultures all belong to Accipitridae — they’re closely related. New World vultures (turkey, black, condor) were once thought to be hawks but are now placed in a separate family (Cathartidae); molecular work shows they’re more closely related to storks.