Red-shouldered hawks returning to Conn.
I heard it first. Standing on a stepladder in my yard, pruning the suckers out of the limbs of my old apple tree, I heard a piercing “KeeAh !!! Kee-Ah !!! Kee-Ah !!!”
Then I looked up and saw a red-shouldered hawk, circling high, wide and lovely in the sky over my house.
And I was happy. Spring is here. The redshoulders — graceful and noisy — are back.
I don’t write down their arrival, as I do phoebes and bluebirds in spring, juncos in the fall. But hearing them, watching them soar around seems to mark a change to warmer days for me, as sure as peepers and tree frogs squawking and quaking away.
And it’s a sound, and sight more common in the state. After fading from the scene for decades, redshouldered hawks are making a serious comeback throughout the Northeast.
Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society, said this may be due, in part, to there being more forested land in the state. Red-shouldered hawks are woodland, swampland birds, so there may simply be more habitat to live in.
But Comins said they’re also proving to be amenable neighbors to humans.
“They’ve really adapted to suburbia in the past 20 years,” he said.
Ryan Maclean, bird education specialist at the Greenwich Audubon Center — owned by Audubon Connecticut, the state chapter of the National Audubon Society — said that even a couple of decades ago, birders at the center’s autumn hawk watch, might see a few hundred red-shouldered hawks migrating south each year.
“In 2014, it was over 1,000,” he said. “In 2022, it was 1,871. On Oct. 28 last year, we saw 532 redshouldered hawks in one day.”
Which is excellent news. While some hawk species — red-tailed hawks, red-shouldered hawks, Cooper’s hawks — are doing well, others are in serious decline. The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection lists northern goshawks as threatened, and sharp-shinned hawks and harriers as endangered species.
Comins said goshawks — which need large forest tracts — may be extirpated in Connecticut.
“For all intents and purposes, they’re gone from the state.” he said.
Likewise, harriers — a grassland species — no longer have much of that habitat to hover and hunt over.
Sharp-shinned hawks need bigger forest tracts. Cooper’s hawks, which are more adaptable, may be outcompeting them as well, Comins said.
It was habitat loss that made red-shouldered hawks so rare in the state.
In the 19th century, settlers cut down most of the state’s trees to make fields. Red-shouldered hawks, being woodland birds, had no suitable place to live here.
But as people gave up farming and abandoned those fields, the trees grew back, and the redshouldered hawks returned.
What is surprising is how they adapted to suburban Connecticut. They may be woodland birds, but small blocks of tree
Red-shouldered hawks — Buteo lineatus — are medium-sized hawks. Mature adults have a lovely rufous plumage on their breasts and shoulders, black-and-white wings and a striped tail.
bordering houses seem to suit them fine for nesting
So, lucky suburbanites, listen and look up.
“It is such a success story,” said Cathy Hagadorn, executive director of Deer Pond Farm nature center in Sherman, which is owned by the Connecticut Audubon Society.
Red-shouldered hawks — Buteo lineatus — are medium-sized hawks. Mature adults have a lovely rufous plumage on their breasts and shoulders, black-and-white wings and a striped tail.
They feed on small rodents, amphibians and snakes
Hagadorn said she’s seen a red-shouldered hawk swoop into the nigh grass near the center’s pond and fly away with a leg sticking out its mouth.
“And it’s a frog,” she said.
And unlike their larger, bulkier cousins — the redtailed hawk — red-shouldered hawks have comely lines.
“They’re incredible to look at,” said MacLean of the Greenwich Audubon Center.
“They’re really graceful,” said Bethany Sheffer, volunteer coordinator and naturalist at the Sharon Audubon Center, which is owned by Audubon Connecticut.
Sheffer knows of what she speaks. She often talks to group to groups accompanied by Oban, a female red-shouldered hawk who imprinted on humans as a chick and is an excellent educational bird.
In the spring, redshouldered hawks call out as they circle and loop in the air, both to establish territory and to attract a mate. They are the most vocal of the state’s hawks.
“For the last couple of weeks, Oban’s started calling,” Sheffer said.
Hagadorn said seeing such birds should make humans a little more vocal themselves about preserving natural habitat and protecting the wildlife that lives in it.
“Maybe we need to develop our own raptor calls,” she said.