Broad-winged Hawk

About the Broad-winged Hawk

The Broad-winged Hawk is a modest, crow-sized woodland buteo for most of the year -- and then twice a year it stages one of the greatest spectacles in North American birding. Nearly the entire world population funnels through Texas in migration, riding thermals in swirling flocks called kettles that can hold thousands of birds. Corpus Christi's hawk watch has recorded single DAYS of several hundred thousand.

Adults are neat and compact: banded black-and-white tail, rusty-barred chest, and broad wings with a crisp dark border visible from below. Their thin, whistled call is a common sound dubbed into movies -- usually over footage of an eagle.

Away from the big coastal river of raptors, spring birds drop into stopover woods all along the coast. These photos come from the High Island area in April 2022, where migrating Broad-wings were pausing in the same oak mottes that shelter the warblers.

A perched migrant Broad-wing is a gift: they sit tight and digest, more tolerant than any resident hawk. Work the edges of the motte in the first hours after a front and check every mid-story silhouette.