Bird Profile

Sharp-shinned Hawk

North America's smallest hawk is a songbird specialist the size of a jay, and it is the accipiter most often misidentified in both directions. Structure settles it, size does not.

The Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipiter striatus) is the smallest hawk on the continent, a compact, short-winged, long-tailed accipiter built to chase small birds through branches. A male is only a little bigger than a Blue Jay. A female is noticeably larger, which is where most of the identification trouble starts.

Adults are blue-gray above with fine rusty barring across white underparts and a fierce red eye. Juveniles, which are the birds most people see at feeders, are brown above with coarse, somewhat blurry reddish-brown streaking that runs down onto the belly, and a yellow eye. Both ages show a long, narrowly banded tail.

The name comes from the tarsus, the lower leg, which in this species is thin and laterally flattened, like a blade. Once you have seen the legs on a perched bird they are hard to unsee, and they remain one of the better clues for separating it from its larger relative, the Cooper's Hawk.

How to identify a Sharp-shinned Hawk#

Look at the outline before anything else. Short rounded wings, a long tail, and a small head that hardly projects in front of the wings, so a flying Sharp-shinned can look almost headless. The flight is a burst of quick, snappy, slightly flicking wingbeats followed by a short glide, faster and more nervous than the steadier rhythm of a Cooper's Hawk.

Perched, it looks small-headed and hooded: the dark cap runs into the dark back with no contrast at the nape. The eye sits fairly centrally on a rounded head, which gives the bird a wide-eyed expression, and the legs are thin enough to look fragile.

The tail is the single most useful mark when you can see it well. It ends square or slightly notched with visible corners, and the white band at the tip is narrow and often worn away entirely by late winter.

Sharp-shinned or Cooper's? Use structure, not size#

Size fails here more often than anything else in North American birding, because the two species overlap. A large female Sharp-shinned Hawk and a small male Cooper's Hawk are close in length and weight, and a lone hawk gives you no scale reference. Work through structure instead.

It is worth saying plainly that some birds cannot be identified. Fast, distant or backlit accipiters get logged as accipiter species by people who have watched thousands of them. That is a correct answer, not a cop-out, and the same honest approach applies at the feeder.

Sex adds a second layer. In both species females are much larger than males, an extreme version of the reverse size dimorphism common in bird-eating raptors. A female Sharp-shinned Hawk is roughly a third longer than her mate and can weigh close to twice as much, which is why she takes larger prey and why she is the bird most often mistaken for a small Cooper's Hawk. If you can watch a pair together in spring, the difference is startling.

Things that are not accipiters#

Half of all reported feeder hawks are something else entirely. The falcons are the usual mix-up, and they are separated by wing shape: falcons have long pointed wings and fly with continuous rowing beats, while accipiters have short rounded wings and alternate flapping with gliding.

What Sharp-shinned Hawks eat#

Small birds dominate the diet to an unusual degree for a raptor: sparrows, juncos, warblers, finches, siskins, chickadees, kinglets and thrushes make up the great majority of prey, with insects and small mammals a minor supplement. Male Sharp-shinned Hawks, being smaller, take smaller prey than females do.

The hunting method is a low, concealed approach followed by a short explosive chase, using hedges, buildings and tree lines as cover right up to the strike. Prey is killed with the feet and usually carried to a regular plucking post, a stump, branch or fence rail where feathers pile up. If you find a scatter of finch feathers on the same log twice, you have found the hawk's kitchen.

This diet is why the species and bird feeders intersect at all. A feeding station reliably concentrates exactly the birds it hunts: Dark-eyed Juncos, American Goldfinches, Pine Siskins and House Sparrows in one predictable spot, every day, all winter.

Migration and a changing picture#

Sharp-shinned Hawks breed in dense conifer and mixed forest across Alaska, Canada and forested parts of the United States, and many migrate long distances, wintering across the US and into Central America. Some western and southern populations are resident.

Migration is when most people see them. They stream past ridge-top and coastal hawk watch sites in September and October in numbers, often as the most abundant accipiter counted. Autumn is also when feeder encounters spike in much of the East and Midwest, overlapping with migration feeding season.

Counts at eastern hawk watches fell substantially from their late twentieth century peaks, which prompted a good deal of concern and debate. One prominent hypothesis is that more Sharp-shinned Hawks now winter farther north, in part because bird feeders provide a reliable winter prey supply, so fewer birds pass the traditional counting sites. That idea fits some winter survey data, but migration counts are influenced by many factors and the picture is not fully resolved. Treat any confident single explanation with caution.

If you see one, log it. Winter raptor records from yards feed directly into the surveys that address exactly this question, and submitting them through citizen science projects costs nothing.

When one is hunting your feeders#

A Sharp-shinned Hawk taking a junco in your yard is ordinary predation in an ordinary place. It feels different because you set the table, but accipiters have hunted flocking songbirds for a very long time, and a feeder changes the location rather than the outcome.

1. Take the feeders down for one to two weeks. The prey flock disperses, the hawk moves to another patch, and your small birds return afterward.
2. Add escape cover roughly 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 m) from the feeders. A brush pile or dense native shrub gives small birds somewhere to dive without giving the hawk an ambush perch on top of the feeder.
3. Move feeders off wide open lawn, where a chase succeeds most easily. See where to hang a feeder.
4. Check your glass. Panicked flocks hit windows, so a hawk problem often becomes a window strike problem, and feeder distance from windows matters more when a hawk is around.
5. Do not strip the yard of cover. A bare yard is worse for small birds, not safer.

The full sequence, with timings and what to expect when you put feeders back, is in hawks at the feeder. The same approach applies to the Cooper's Hawk, which in many suburbs is now the more frequent feeder visitor of the two.

One genuine welfare comparison is worth keeping in mind. Predation by native hawks is part of a functioning system. Predation by outdoor cats is not, and it kills vastly more birds. If the deaths at your feeder bother you, the cat is the problem you can actually solve.

Nesting and secrecy#

Sharp-shinned Hawks nest in dense conifer stands, building a stick platform typically 20 to 60 feet (6 to 18 m) up, tucked close to the trunk and very well hidden. Clutches are usually 4 or 5 eggs, incubation runs about a month, and young leave the nest around four weeks later.

Breeding birds are secretive to the point of being hard to study, which is one reason population trends for this species are less well characterized than for larger raptors. They are quiet away from the nest, and the sharp kik-kik-kik call is mainly heard by anyone who gets too close to one.

Because they nest in the north and in dense forest, most suburban yards will not host a nesting pair. What you get instead are migrants and wintering birds, which is why encounters are so seasonal and so unpredictable.

Pairs are also unusually sensitive to disturbance early in the season, which is one reason wildlife agencies discourage approaching accipiter nests to photograph them. If you find one, note the location, keep your distance and leave the pair alone. A nest that fails because of repeated human visits costs the local population far more than any photograph is worth.

Living with Sharp-shinned Hawks#

• Learn three marks: square tail tip, small head that barely projects, and pencil-thin legs. They will settle most birds you get a decent look at.
• Accept unidentified accipiters. Guessing between two species that overlap in size does nobody any favors.
• Expect them mainly in fall and winter, in brief visits with long gaps.
• Respond by removing the concentration of prey for a week or two, not by trying to move the hawk.
• Keep escape cover close to the feeders year round, which helps against cats as well as hawks.