Sharp-shinned Hawk and Cooper's Hawk Flight Silhouette Patterns In flight, you may get a good, long look at a bird as it tries to gain altitude and soars in circles above your head or you may only get a short glimpse of a bird as it blasts by you trying to catch dinner. Sharp-shinned Hawks are small, long-tailed hawks with short, rounded wings. Other slight difference may be noted in plumage via the sharp-shins lacking the capped appearance of adult Cooper's (being more hooded) and being generally slightly darker above. The hawks follow similar landscape features and often are concentrated in certain areas. It is during migration that the Sharp-shin is most likely to be seen in numbers, with dozens or even hundreds passing at some favored points on coastlines, lake shores, and mountain ridges.

Females are considerably larger than males. Sharp-shinned Hawks migrate south out of Canada in the fall and are observed at hawk watches in very large numbers. The sharp-shinned hawk usually evidences a slimmer, slighter look, with more dainty features, and has relatively longer wings and a shorter and more squared tail with a much thinner white tip. But if … It occurs in highlands from far southern Mexico (Chiapas and Oaxaca), through Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, to Nicaragua. A sharp-shinned hawk will appear to be the same color from the back to the top of the head, while a Cooper’s hawk will have a paler nape with a contrasting darker cap on the head and darker plumage lower on the back. The White-breasted Hawk (Accipiter chionogaster) is a subspecies of the Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus). They have small heads that in flight do not always project beyond the “wrists” of the wings. Sharp-shinned Hawk numbers declined during the DDT pesticide years (mid-1940s to 1972), but rebounded after DDT was banned.

Neck Length: A sharp-shinned hawk may appear to … It is, as far as known, resident, but some local movements may occur. Distribution. The tail tends to be square-tipped and may show a notch at the tip.

At other seasons the hawks lurk in the woods, ambushing songbirds and generally staying out of sight.