White-tailed Hawk

About the White-tailed Hawk

A big, long-winged hawk built like a buteo that wants to be a kite. The adult is clean and unmistakable overhead: gray above, white below, a bright rufous shoulder patch, and a white tail crossed near the tip by one sharp black band. Perched, the wingtips reach past the end of that short tail, which gives the bird a front-heavy, top-heavy look no other Texas hawk quite has. Immatures are a different problem entirely - dark, blotchy, and variable, and they take about three years to sort themselves out into adult plumage.

Watch one hunt and the shape makes sense. White-tailed Hawks hang almost motionless into a coastal wind, wings held in a shallow dihedral, hardly beating, working a patch of prairie for a long time before dropping. They are also famous fire birds: a grass fire on the coastal plain will pull them in from miles around to take whatever runs out ahead of the flames.

Pairs are long-term and strongly attached to a territory. The nest is a bulky stick platform built low and out in the open, set on top of a yucca, a granjeno, or a squat mesquite rather than tucked into a canopy, and it is often reused and added to year after year until it becomes a substantial mound. One or two eggs is the usual clutch, and the young stay dependent on their parents well after leaving the nest.

In Texas this is a specialty worth traveling for. They are year-round residents of the coastal prairie and the South Texas brush country and are found essentially nowhere else in the United States.