A Red-Shouldered Hawk.

January  12. 

Red-Shouldered Hawk

(Winter Hawk)

Mr. Farmer brings me a hawk which he thinks has caught thirty or forty of his chickens since summer, for he has lost so many, and he has seen a hawk like this catch some of them. Thinks he has seen this same one sitting a long time upright on a tree, high or low, about his premises, and when at length a hen or this year’s chicken had strayed far from the rest, it skimmed along and picked her up without pausing, and bore her off, the chicken not having seen him approaching. He found this, caught by one leg and frozen to death, in a trap which he had set for mink by a spring and baited with fish. 

This measures nineteen by forty-two inches and is, according to Wilson and Nuttall,a young Falco lineatus, or red-shouldered hawk. 

It might as well be called red or rusty breasted hawk. Nuttall says it lives on frogs, crayfish, etc., and does not go far north, — not even to Massachusetts, he thought. Its note, kee-oo. He never saw one soar, at least in winter. 

According to all accounts Wilson’s Falco hyemalis is the old of this bird, for there is a remarkable difference between old and young. 

Mine agrees with Wilson’s F. lineatus, or the young, except that the greater wing-coverts and secondaries are hardly what I should call “pale olive brown thickly spotted,” etc., but rather dusky-brown, somewhat indistinctly barred with whitish (which is pure white on each edge of the feathers) and edged with rusty; that the shafts of the breast-feathers are only dark-brown; that the tail is not quite black, but very dark brown, and is not “broadly tipped” with white, but only with a quarter of an inch of it; vent not “pale ochre,” but white; legs and feet hardly fine yellow, but dull gree ish-yellow; femorals as bright rusty as the breast. 

It differs from Wilson’s winter falcon, which is considered by Audubon and Brewer the same as the lineatus, in not having what I should call a “tooth in the upper mandible;” head, sides of neck, etc., hardly “streaked with white;” above, all primaries and exterior tail feathers not “brownish orange,” and tail not “barred alternately with dark and pale brown,” its inner veins and coverts not “white;” and what is very important, the breast and beneath is not “white.” 

Since Nuttall makes it a southern bird, and it is not likely to come north in the winter, it would seem that it breeds here. 

Farmer says that he saw what he calls the common hen-hawk, one soaring high with apparently a chicken in its claws, while a young hawk circled beneath, when former suddenly let drop the chicken, but the young failing to catch, he shot down like lightning and caught and bore off the falling chicken before it reached the earth.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  January 12, 1859

Farmer brings me a hawk which he thinks has caught thirty or forty of his chickens. See August 29, 1858 (“J. Farmer shot a sharp-shinned hawk this morning, which was endeavoring to catch one of his chickens.”)

January 12. A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, January 12

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, I love you like I love the sky

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

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