Problem Solving
Hawks Hunting at Your Feeder
A hawk working your feeder is unsettling to watch and completely normal. There are two legitimate responses: improve the escape cover, or take the feeders down for a couple of weeks.
The short answer
- The bird hunting your feeder is almost always a Cooper's hawk or a sharp-shinned hawk. Both are native, both are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and harming, trapping or harassing one is a federal offense.
- A hawk at a feeder means your yard is supporting enough songbirds to feed a predator. It is a sign the setup is working, not failing.
- The one fix with real effect is escape cover: dense shrubs or a brush pile about 10 feet (3 m) from the feeder, so small birds have somewhere to dive into within a second.
- If the pressure is relentless, take the feeders down for one to two weeks. The songbirds disperse to other food, the hawk moves on, and you can restart.
- Never use netting, decoys of owls, spikes or noise devices aimed at a raptor. They do not work for long and some of them injure birds.
The hawk that appears at a feeder in a flurry of feathers is nearly always a Cooper's hawk (Accipiter cooperii) or a sharp-shinned hawk (Accipiter striatus). They eat songbirds for a living, they are very good at it, and a feeder is exactly the sort of concentration of prey they evolved to exploit.
Both species are native, both are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and there is no legal or ethical version of getting rid of one. What you can do is give the small birds better odds, or stop concentrating them for a while.
This page covers how to tell the two accipiters apart from the hawks that are not interested in your feeder, what a hawk's presence actually means for your songbird numbers, the cover geometry that helps, and how to take feeders down properly if it comes to that.
Which hawk you are looking at#
Feeder-hunting hawks are accipiters: short rounded wings, a long tail used as a rudder, and an attack that comes low and fast around the corner of a house or through a hedge.
| Species | Size | Feeder behavior | Tell |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sharp-shinned hawk | Jay to small crow | Common at feeders, takes finches and sparrows | Small head, thin pencil legs, squared tail tip |
| Cooper's hawk | Crow-sized | Very common at feeders, takes doves and starlings too | Larger head projecting past the wings, thicker legs, rounded tail with a wide white tip |
| Red-tailed hawk | Buteo, broad-winged | Perches nearby, rarely takes feeder birds | Broad wings, soaring, hunting rodents and rabbits |
| Merlin | Falcon, stocky | Takes feeder birds in open country and towns | Pointed wings, direct powered flight, no gliding |
| American kestrel | Falcon, small | Mostly insects and voles | Rusty back, black facial marks, hovers |
Separating a sharp-shinned from a Cooper's is genuinely hard, and juveniles of both are brown and streaked rather than gray with rusty barring. Nobody needs to get it right for management purposes: the advice is identical either way.
A hawk means the yard is working
Accipiters hunt where prey is dense. If one is patrolling your feeders, you have built up enough seed-eating birds to support a predator that needs roughly one bird a day. That is a functioning food web in a suburban yard, which is rarer than it should be.
What a hawk actually costs your feeder birds#
Far less than it looks. Accipiter attacks fail more often than they succeed, and a hawk working a feeder is taking a small share of the birds that pass through over a season. Feeder mortality is dominated by other things: outdoor cats, window strikes, disease at dirty feeders, and winter weather.
What you notice is the silence. After a strike, the yard empties and stays empty for twenty minutes to a few hours while the survivors sit tight in cover. It reads as devastation and it is mostly caution. If your feeders stay quiet for days on end, work through why are no birds coming to my feeder before blaming the hawk.
The birds most often taken are the abundant ones: house sparrows, European starlings, mourning doves, house finches. A Cooper's hawk in a town center often lives largely on the two introduced species.
The one thing that genuinely helps: escape cover#
An accipiter's strike depends on the last second of open air. Give a chickadee somewhere to disappear into within that second and most attacks fail.
- Put dense cover about 10 feet (3 m) from the feeder: an evergreen, a thick native shrub, or a well-built brush pile. Close enough to reach, far enough that a cat cannot use it as an ambush hide.
- Favor cover a hawk cannot fly into. Thorny tangles, twiggy shrubs and stacked brush let a sparrow through and stop a bird with a 2 foot (60 cm) wingspan.
- Avoid long clear runs beside the house. Accipiters use the corner of a building to arrive unseen, so a feeder in the middle of an open lawn with cover only at the far end is the worst arrangement.
- Two or three smaller cover points beat one big shrub, because birds scatter in different directions. See how many feeders and how far apart for spreading the flock out.
Build the brush pile before winter
A pile of prunings 4 to 6 feet (1.2 to 1.8 m) across, coarse branches on the bottom and finer material on top, is the cheapest predator refuge there is and it goes up in an afternoon. Site it about 10 feet (3 m) from the feeder, not against the fence where a cat can work it.
Pausing the feeders, done properly#
If a hawk is catching a bird a day at your window and you would rather not watch it, taking the feeders down is legitimate and harmless. Birds do not depend on any single feeder, a point covered in do birds become dependent on feeders.
Do it properly or it will not work:
- Take down everything at once, including suet, nectar and any ground feeding. A hawk keeps checking a site that still holds a few birds.
- Sweep or rake the spilled seed under the feeders, since ground foragers alone are enough to keep the yard on the hawk's rounds.
- Leave it clear for one to two weeks. Less than a week rarely disperses the flock.
- Restart with the escape cover in place, and expect the songbirds back within a few days. If they are slow, the timeline in how long until birds find a new feeder applies.
Moving feeders to a different part of the yard sometimes works on its own, particularly if the new spot has cover and less clear flight approach. The method for doing that without losing your regulars is in moving a feeder without losing the birds.
The law, plainly#
Every hawk, falcon, eagle and owl in North America is protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, with state statutes usually stacked on top. That means no shooting, no trapping, no poison, no capturing, no destroying nests, and no deliberate harassment. Penalties are federal and real.
There is no depredation permit available to a homeowner because a hawk is eating birds at a feeder. Permits exist for genuine agricultural and human-safety conflicts and go through the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Deterrents that hurt birds
Netting stretched over a feeding area entangles songbirds. Spiked owl decoys, monofilament lines and reflective streamers strung near feeders catch wings and feet. Anything marketed to "scare raptors" is either useless within a week or a hazard to the birds you are trying to protect.
Window strikes during a hawk attack#
Panicked flushes are one of the main ways feeder birds hit glass. A hawk arrives, thirty birds explode off the feeder in every direction, and several fly straight at a reflection of the sky.
If you have hawks, treating your windows is not optional. External markers spaced no more than about 2 inches (5 cm) apart, or a feeder placed either under 3 feet (1 m) or over 30 feet (9 m) from the glass, are the two changes with real effect. The details are in preventing window strikes and feeders and windows.
Hawks at nest boxes and bird baths#
Accipiters take fledglings around nest boxes in late spring, which is upsetting and not something to intervene in. Correct box siting, including a clear approach and a predator guard on the pole, is covered in nest boxes: sizing and siting. Guards are aimed at raccoons, cats and snakes; nothing keeps a hawk from taking a fledgling in the open, and nothing should.
Bird baths draw the same attention as feeders, for the same reason. Site them with cover about 10 feet (3 m) away and open ground in between, following bird baths.
What to do this week#
- Watch once and identify the bird. If it has a long banded tail and short rounded wings, it is an accipiter and the advice on this page applies.
- Build or improve one dense cover point about 10 feet (3 m) from your main feeder.
- Check that the flight approach to the feeder is not a clean straight run past a wall or fence corner.
- Treat the nearest window, because the hawk will cause flushes whatever else you do.
- If the strikes are daily and you cannot watch it, take everything down for two weeks and restart with the cover in place.
- Do not buy a deterrent. There is nothing on the market that legally and reliably removes a hawk from a yard.
Frequently asked questions#
Is it legal to scare a hawk away from my bird feeder?
Walking outside and causing a hunting hawk to leave is not illegal, but anything beyond incidental disturbance is. All North American hawks are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, so shooting, trapping, poisoning, capturing or deliberately harassing one carries federal penalties, and state law usually adds more. If you want the hawk gone, remove the reason it is there by taking the feeders down for a couple of weeks.
What kind of hawk hunts at bird feeders?
Almost always an accipiter: the Cooper's hawk or the smaller sharp-shinned hawk. Both have short rounded wings and a long banded tail built for chasing songbirds through cover, and both learn feeder locations. Red-tailed hawks perch nearby but are hunting rodents, not chickadees, and merlins take feeder birds in some regions.
Will a hawk clear all the birds out of my yard?
No. A feeder-hunting accipiter takes a small fraction of the birds passing through and moves on when the catch rate drops. Songbirds will go quiet and vanish for anything from twenty minutes to a day after a strike, then come back. Persistent absence usually means something else, such as a cat, a nearby nest of hawks, or seed that has gone stale.
Should I take my bird feeders down if a hawk is hunting there?
It is a reasonable choice if the hawk is catching birds daily and you find it distressing. Take everything down for one to two weeks, including the ground feeding, so the songbird flock disperses and the hawk stops finding your yard worth checking. Put the feeders back afterward with better escape cover nearby.
Does an owl decoy keep hawks away from feeders?
No. Plastic owls stop working within days for every species that matters, and songbirds habituate to them just as fast as hawks do. Some are also fitted with spikes or reflective streamers that can injure birds. Spend the effort on planting cover instead.
A hawk hit my window chasing a bird. What do I do?
Contain and call. Put the bird in a ventilated cardboard box in a dark, quiet, warm place with no food or water, wear gloves because the feet are the hazard, and contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator or your state wildlife agency the same day. Do not attempt to treat it yourself; possessing a raptor without permits is illegal.