The rough-legged hawk is one of the best birds on my backyard list. To qualify for the list, the bird doesn’t need to actually enter the yard, but it does have to be visible from the yard.
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We see rough-legged hawks in the Chicago area only in winter. They nest in the higher latitudes, hunting mostly lemmings on the tundra from the Northwest Territories of Canada to Siberia. Many northern animals, from polar bears to loons, show this kind of circumpolar distribution. Tundra is tundra it seems, whether it is in northern Scandinavia or northern Alaska; and with only a tiny space separating Eurasia from North America at the Bering Strait, even land dwellers, can move easily from one hemisphere to the other.
Rough-legged hawks begin arriving here in October. They are common from mid-November through the end of March, and we usually hear of some sightings in April and early May. The record high count for the Chicago region comes from Berrien County Michigan, where 200 birds were seen passing in a single day in November 1971. Some of the birds in such large, migrating flocks are mated pairs that seem to stay together through the winter, which is why I say that there could have been two rough-legged hawks in my neighborhood at once.
The scientific name of the rough-legged hawk is Buteo lagopus. “Buteo” tells us that this is a soaring hawk. The literal translation of “lagopus” is “rabbit-footed.” The name has nothing to do with luck. It refers to the feathering on the birds’ tarsi, which extends all the way to the toes. The feathers reminded the taxonomist who named this bird of the fur on a rabbit’s foot.
Rough-legged hawks, for all their large size, have small, relatively weak feet. Birds of prey depend on their feet. Their hooked beaks may administer the coup de grace and tear meat from bone, but their talons are their principal weapons, the tools they use to capture and subdue their prey.
The appearance of these birds does not come as a total surprise. The estimates of the numbers of breeding eagles in the lower 48 states have climbed from about 500 pairs in the early 60s to almost 1,800 pairs in 1985. Winter censuses in Illinois showed only 63 eagles in 1960, but by January 1986, the total was up to 1,217.
