“A behavioral observation will also help. A passing raptor will notice a group of people standing on a mountaintop all looking its way. An accipiter that must drop a shoulder or turn its body to study the crowd is a Sharp-shinned Hawk. A Cooper’s Hawk simply swivels its head, like a turtle looking back over its shell. The body stays firm.”
Hawk watching requires identifying birds from quite a long way off. Some will pass so high overhead that they can’t even be seen with the naked eye. Others will fly by hundreds of yards to left or right, mere specks on the horizon.
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Hawk watching as semiorganized sport began in the 30s. Hawk watchers gathered at places such as Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, Cape May, New Jersey, and Duluth, Minnesota, to monitor the passing of the raptors in spring and fall. These places are choice for geographic reasons. They offer excellent updrafts or provide a route around broad expanses of open water that raptors are reluctant to cross.
Wing shape is another guide. Red-shouldered hawks’ wings are like “a long, rectangular plank. The entire wing juts forward when the bird is in a full soar, as if it were reaching out, arms wide, to embrace something.” In contrast, the broad-winged hawk has short, broad wings that it holds at “an almost perfect right-angle to the body.”
Pete Dunne, who is responsible for the text of Hawks in Flight, describes holistic birding as “a refined blend of identification skills and conjecture.” The conjecture part of that blend troubles the people who hew to the other school of contemporary birding. This is the feather-by-feather approach, looking at wild birds the way a taxonomist in a museum would look at a dead specimen.
The lack of color is deliberate. Looking at distant birds against the sky, you will see everything in shades of gray, so that is the way the book presents the birds.
