The red-tailed hawk is one of several species that have made peace with humans and live among us. I’m continually amazed at how they routinely perch on light posts along I-84, watching for ground squirrels and mice in the borrow pits. Like American kestrels and cliff swallows, they seem to understand vehicles and mostly avoid getting whacked.

I’m not surprised to see them nest in the North End, Hulls Gulch, Military Reserve and elsewhere in the Treasure Valley. And when I see a chunky raptor out in the Great Basin, far from urban sycamores and giant cottonwoods, the chances are excellent it’s a red-tailed hawk.

All About Birds says: “This is probably the most common hawk in North America. If you’ve got sharp eyes, you’ll see several individuals on almost any long car ride, anywhere.” True.

We can check on the commonness claim. Partners in Flight estimates there are 2.8 million red-tails in the U.S. and Canada. Next is the broad-winged hawk, which we rarely see in southwestern Idaho, at 1.8 million. In third place is Cooper’s hawk at 840,000. There are also an estimated 2.8 million American kestrels, but those are falcons, not hawks.

“Buteo jamaicensis” seems an odd scientific name for a bird that is distributed from Alaska to Nicaragua. Buteo simply means “buzzard” or “hawk” in Latin. While we tend to think of “buzzards” as vultures, the original meaning is “hawk.” There are 24 species on earth with “buzzard” in their name. They’re all hawks.

“Jamaicensis” is actually not about Jamaica. It’s from the Arawak word Xaymaca, for land of woods and water. Most appropriate for a hawk that lives almost everywhere in North America. But red-tails up the ante by also occupying deserts with little woods or water.

Red-tails are relatively easy to identify due to their robust build and flight pattern. But it’s the white chest and streaky belly band that often tell us what we’re looking at. Those are good field marks if the bird is facing you and if it’s one of the lighter-plumaged birds.

But red-tails come in a variety of color morphs. One bird has wintered in our neighborhood for the last several years, which is a deep, chestnut brown. It is so different from the birds I see over the rest of the year in southwestern Idaho that I briefly wonder if it isn’t some other species.

According to Bird of the World, there are 16 subspecies of red-tails, organized into two broad groups. The first is “Harlan’s hawk,” which has been treated as a distinct species in the past. Harlan’s are dominated by dark-bodied birds that might strike you as rough-legged hawks on first glance. This group may still be resurrected as a separate species due to its limited interbreeding with other red-tails where their ranges meet.

The bird in our neighborhood is probably Harlan’s, coming down from Alaska or the Yukon. The tail pattern, ”… whitish or gray mottled or streaked longitudinally with black, at times tinged reddish or light brown” matches that bird’s tail.

The remaining 15 subspecies are simply called “typical” red-tailed hawks. There is so much individual variation among these birds that field identification to the subspecies level is not possible in most cases. These range from the nearly white Krider’s red-tailed hawk of the northern Great Plains to forms nearly as dark as Harlan’s.

Sometimes common species don’t get too much attention. But not so for this hawk. The Red-tailed Hawk Project (redtailedhawkproject.org/) was created at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to investigate the ecology and evolution of this amazing species. Key researchers include two ornithologists with links to Idaho — Neil A. Paprocki and Bryce W. Robinson.

For those of us interested in the geographic variation in plumage, the “Subspecies” tab on their website has a nice map and descriptions of the various forms, with links for each to photos in the Macauley Library. If you submit photos with your eBird checklists, this library is where your photos end up.

For the Harlan’s variety, there is also a great “Identification plate” by Bryce Robinson. This is like a traditional field guide, illustrating details of adult and juvenile tails, wings, bellies and backs. Unless you band red-tails, you probably won’t see most of these finer marks. But they are sure lovely to look at and watch for.

Historically, the greatest problem for red-tailed hawks has been shooting. Because red-tails are big, and perch quietly on power poles, trees and fence posts, they are easy pickings for people with big guns and small hearts. They are also threatened by lead poisoning from, guess what? More guns — in particular, lead ammunition used where shooters obliterate ground squirrels, prairie dogs and ground hogs, and leave the carnage on the land. As a kid, in hunter safety and ethics, I was taught you eat what you shoot. I guess that isn’t taught anymore.

Like most raptors, they have also been killed by the thousands (millions?) by electrocution when they land or take off from power poles. Thankfully, this problem has been steadily reduced over the years where conservationists and power companies cooperate to fit power poles with devices that protect from electrocution.

The Avian Power Line Interaction Committee (APLIC) was formed in 1989 to address both electrocutions and collisions with power lines. APLIC was originally comprised of 10 utilities, the Edison Electric Institute, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Audubon Society. Membership now includes over 70 utilities, along with the original members.

Idaho Power has been working within their region of southern Idaho and eastern Oregon to reduce raptor deaths since 1972. Check the Energy & The Environment tab on their website for more details.

Red-tailed hawks are doing well, according to data from the Breeding Bird Survey. Populations across the U.S. have increased +1.36% per year from 1966 to 2022. In Idaho, the increase has been even better at +3.06% over the same period.

Growing up, my dad would walk us kids through the big bird books of the time — “Birds of America” (Pearson, 1917) and “A Natural History of American Birds of Eastern and Central North America” (Forbush and May, 1925). The text seemed endless and inscrutable. But the plates hit home. Louis Agassiz Fuertes’ painting of a red-tailed hawk, perched high on a snag, became a portal to the entire unknown and possible world for me.

To this day, every red-tail I see ripples back through my life to those childhood imaginations. Red-tails are always welcome here.