15 Types of Hawks in the United States and How to Tell Them Apart
October 11, 2026
A hawk circling over a highway or perched on a fence post looks similar to a dozen other raptors at first glance, but the details separate one species from another fast once you know where to look. Learning the different types of hawks found across the United States starts with two basic body plans: the broad-winged, soaring buteos and the slim, forest-hunting accipiters, plus a handful of outliers that don’t fit neatly into either camp.
This guide walks through 15 hawk species you can realistically encounter in North America, from the sparrow-sized Sharp-shinned Hawk to the tropical Black Kite that occasionally strays north of the border. Each entry covers field marks, habitat, range, and the behaviors that make identification easier the next time one of these raptors passes overhead.
Important Note: Hawks are wild raptors, not domesticated companions. Every species on this list is protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and keeping one legally requires a state falconry permit and specialized training. If you’re searching for easy care pet birds or low maintenance bird species for a home aviary, look toward parakeets, canaries, or finches instead — hawks demand a level of commitment far beyond simple bird care for beginners.
| Hawk | Typical Size | Primary Habitat | Where to Find in the US |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sharp-shinned Hawk | Small (crow-sized or smaller) | Dense conifer and mixed forest | Nationwide, year-round in parts of East and West |
| Cooper’s Hawk | Medium accipiter | Woodlands, suburbs | Nationwide |
| Northern Harrier | Medium, long-winged | Marshes, open grassland | Nationwide, breeds mainly north |
| Harris’s Hawk | Medium-large | Desert scrub, mesquite | Southwest (AZ, TX, NM) |
| Zone-tailed Hawk | Large, slender buteo | Canyons, desert mountains | Southwest border states |
| Red-tailed Hawk | Large buteo | Open country, roadsides | Nationwide |
| Red-shouldered Hawk | Medium buteo | Wet woodlands | Eastern US, California coast |
| Broad-winged Hawk | Small buteo | Deciduous forest | Eastern US, migratory |
| White-tailed Hawk | Large buteo | Coastal prairie, grassland | South Texas coast |
| Common Black Hawk | Large, broad-winged | Riparian streams | Southwest (rare, seasonal) |
| Short-tailed Hawk | Small-medium buteo | Woodland edges, wetlands | Florida (isolated population) |
| Ferruginous Hawk | Largest US buteo | Open plains, prairie | Western Great Plains |
| American Goshawk | Large accipiter | Mature forest | Northern US, mountain West |
| Crested Goshawk | Medium accipiter | Tropical/subtropical forest | Not native to US (Asia) |
| Black Kite | Medium, forked tail | Wetlands, farmland, urban edges | Not native to US (Old World) |
1. Sharp-shinned Hawk
The Accipiter striatus is the smallest accipiter in North America, and its size alone is often the first clue birders use. This species prefers dense conifer or mixed forests but can also be seen in open deciduous woodlands and thickets during migration and winter.
Range plays a big part in narrowing down an ID. Birdzilla notes that the species is present year-round in the eastern and western US, though birds that breed farther north in Alaska and Canada migrate south to the southern US and Central America for winter. Sharp-shinned Hawks are notorious for ambushing songbirds at feeders, including the occasional hummingbird caught off guard mid-hover.
A common question among backyard birders is how to tell a Sharp-shinned Hawk from a Cooper’s Hawk before it disappears into the trees. The safest bet is head-to-tail proportion: a Sharp-shinned’s head barely projects past its wrists in flight, giving it a “flying capital T” shape rather than the bulkier cross-like silhouette of its larger cousin.
2. Cooper’s Hawk
The Accipiter cooperii is a nimble, midsized accipiter that has become a familiar sight in suburban backyards across the country. Birds and Blooms points out that Cooper’s hawks frequenting feeding stations aren’t drawn in by the seed — they’re hunting the songbirds the seed attracts.
Adults show a blue-gray back with reddish barring across the chest and belly, while juveniles are heavily streaked with yellow eyes that darken to red as they mature. Some of the small songbirds targeted at feeders include purple-hued species like purple finches, which stand out against winter snow and unfortunately against a hunting hawk’s eye too.
Common Mistake: Many beginning birders assume any accipiter at a feeder is a Cooper’s Hawk. Check the tail shape first — Cooper’s Hawks have a longer, more rounded tail tip, while Sharp-shinned Hawks show a squared-off tail with a thinner white terminal band.
3. Northern Harrier (Marsh Hawk)
The Northern Harrier, scientifically Circus hudsonius, is built differently than the other hawks on this list — long wings, a long tail, and an owl-like facial disc that helps it hear rodents rustling in tall grass. According to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the northern harrier, formerly known as the marsh hawk, is the only harrier regularly found in North America.
The single most reliable field mark is a bright white rump patch, visible even at a distance as the bird glides low over open ground. Birds and Blooms describes this patch as large enough to spot clearly while the bird is flying overhead, which makes harriers one of the easier hawks to confirm in flight.
Harriers favor marshes, wet meadows, and grasslands over forests, often coursing low and tilting side to side like a giant harrier moth. Anyone scanning a coastal marsh for shorebirds or water birds has a decent chance of spotting one hunting the same territory.
4. Harris’s Hawk
The Harris’s Hawk (Parabuteo unicinctus) stands out from nearly every other North American raptor because of its social behavior. BirdWatching Daily notes that the Harris’s Hawk is one of the few raptor species that hunts in groups, sometimes cooperating with two or three relatives to flush and corner prey.
Plumage-wise, rich rufous shoulders, wing linings, and legs offset an otherwise dark chocolate-brown body, giving the bird a distinctly two-toned look against desert scrub. This species is a mainstay of falconry programs precisely because of its trainability and pack-hunting instincts.
Harris’s Hawks stick to the arid Southwest — mesquite grasslands, saguaro desert, and dry washes across Arizona, New Mexico, and South Texas. Much of their diet consists of ground squirrels, rabbits, and desert reptiles, including several species of iguanas and other lizards that shelter among rocks and cacti.
5. Zone-tailed Hawk
Few North American hawks pull off a disguise quite like the Zone-tailed Hawk. Buteo albonotatus is a fairly large but slender buteo, measuring roughly 18 to 22 inches long with a wingspan approaching 4.5 feet, according to Wikipedia’s summary of the species.
What makes it fascinating is its flight style: dark plumage and a habit of soaring with slightly upturned wings make it look remarkably like a Turkey Vulture from below. Researchers believe the resemblance lets the hawk mingle with vultures and catch prey off guard, since animals that ignore harmless vultures may not register the hawk mixed in among them until it’s too late.
Zone-tailed Hawks favor canyon country and wooded mountain slopes near water across the border states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The tail itself — dark with two or three pale gray bands — is the surest way to separate it from the similarly dark Common Black Hawk found in some of the same canyons.
6. Red-tailed Hawk
If you’ve driven a US highway and glanced at a utility pole, chances are good you’ve already seen this species. The Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) is North America’s most widespread and frequently seen hawk, often perched on roadside poles or soaring over open ground, per BirdNote’s identification guide.
Its rusty-red tail is the clinching feature on adults, though plumage otherwise varies enormously between individuals and regional populations — from the pale “Krider’s” form of the Great Plains to the dark “Harlan’s” form seen in winter across the Midwest. Juveniles lack the red tail entirely, showing a brown-banded tail that can trip up new birders.
Red-tailed Hawks tolerate an enormous range of habitats, from open farmland to desert to city parks, which is a big part of why they’re the hawk most people picture when they hear the word “hawk” at all.
7. Red-shouldered Hawk
With reddish barring across the chest, the Red-shouldered Hawk can look superficially similar to a Cooper’s Hawk when viewed from below, but the rufous shoulder patch that gives Buteo lineatus its name is usually visible on a perched bird, according to Birds and Blooms.
East of the Missouri River, this is a hawk of wet woodlands, while a separate western population ranges from northern Mexico up through California and Washington, often in oak woodlots. Red-shouldered Hawks are frequently heard before they’re seen — their repeated, high-pitched keeyar call carries well through dense forest canopy.
BirdWatching Daily describes the species as a cooperative raptor that will work with other birds to drive off a larger predator or distract prey, a behavior rarely documented in other buteos. Wetland forests that host Red-shouldered Hawks often share space with wading swans and other large waterfowl along the same flooded timber.
8. Broad-winged Hawk
The Broad-winged Hawk (Buteo platypterus) is a small, compact buteo of eastern deciduous forests, easy to overlook for most of the year until autumn migration turns it into a spectacle. When it migrates to South America, the Broad-winged Hawk gathers in huge numbers, and BirdWatching Daily notes these flocks, called kettles, swirl together in the sky in a genuinely striking display.
Outside migration season, Broad-winged Hawks hunt quietly from forest perches, taking amphibians, reptiles, and a substantial number of insects alongside small mammals. Their diet shifts seasonally depending on what’s most abundant in the leaf litter below.
Pro Tip: Mid-September is peak kettle season across the eastern flyways. Hawk-watch sites along ridgelines in Pennsylvania and the Great Lakes shoreline regularly report thousands of Broad-winged Hawks passing in a single day during the right weather window.
9. White-tailed Hawk
Restricted almost entirely to the coastal prairies of South Texas, the White-tailed Hawk (Geranoaetus albicaudatus) is a large, pale buteo built for hunting over open grassland. One quirk that birders love to mention: BirdWatching Daily reports the species always keeps a long stick in its nest, and nobody has a firm explanation for why.
This hawk often follows controlled burns and wildfires, swooping in to catch fleeing rodents and insects exposed by the flames — a hunting strategy shared by very few other North American raptors. The coastal grasslands it favors frequently overlap with working cattle and goat ranches, where the hawk’s rodent-control habits make it a welcome presence for landowners rather than a pest.
10. Common Black Hawk
The Common Black Hawk (Buteogallus anthracinus) is genuinely hard to find north of the border. All About Birds from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes it as a soot-colored hawk with massively broad wings that cuts a distinctive profile in wet wooded habitats along rivers and streams of the southwestern US, noting the species is rare in the US but common farther south in Mexico.
According to the Audubon Field Guide, this hawk is a summer visitor only in the US, arriving mostly in March and departing by September or October, and it hunts low along streams — sometimes wading directly into shallow water — to catch fish, frogs, and crayfish. Its diet overlaps in an odd way with what aquarium keepers stock at home; the small freshwater fish it snatches from streamside pools aren’t far removed from the guppies many hobbyists raise indoors.
Adults are blackish overall with one broad white tail band, which separates them from the superficially similar Zone-tailed Hawk sharing the same canyon country.
11. Short-tailed Hawk
Most of the Short-tailed Hawk’s range sits well south of the US border, but an isolated population makes its home in Florida year-round. BirdWatching Daily confirms the species is primarily a Central and South American bird, and when Florida’s population migrates seasonally, birders head to the Florida Keys for some of the best viewing chances anywhere in the country.
Buteo brachyurus occurs in both a dark and light color morph, a trait that occasionally confuses even experienced observers scanning a soaring buteo against a bright sky. Unlike most other hawks on this list, it often hunts by hovering briefly at altitude before dropping on unsuspecting songbirds — a technique closer to a kestrel’s than a typical buteo’s.
12. Ferruginous Hawk
“Ferruginous” means rusty red, and the Ferruginous Hawk (Buteo regalis) earns the name through the rust coloring on its shoulders and legs, a detail BirdWatching Daily highlights as a key field mark. It’s the largest buteo native to North America, with a bulky build and pale chest that stand out even at a distance across open range country.
This species belongs to the group of open-country buteos that tend to be slower fliers than forest accipiters, favoring grasslands and prairies over woodland. Ground squirrels, prairie dogs, and jackrabbits make up the bulk of its diet, and its numbers track closely with prairie dog colony health across the Great Plains.
13. American (Northern) Goshawk
What US and Canadian birders long called the Northern Goshawk got a taxonomic update: the American Ornithological Society split the species in 2023, and the North American population is now formally the American Goshawk (Accipiter atricapillus), distinct from the Eurasian Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) of the Old World.
According to AviBirds, this is a large, powerful accipiter with broad wings, a long rounded tail, a bold white eyebrow, and finely barred gray underparts in adults, occupying extensive forests across much of Canada, Alaska, and mountainous or northern regions of the US. It’s typically detected by its loud, repeated alarm calls near nests or a sudden burst of fast flight through dense forest rather than by casual sighting.
Key Insight: Because the American Goshawk was only formally separated from its Eurasian counterpart in 2023, older field guides and range maps published before that date may still label the species simply as “Northern Goshawk.”
Females are noticeably larger and heavier than males, and the species is considered the most formidable forest hawk in North America — similar in build to Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks but far more tied to large, intact forest landscapes.
14. Crested Goshawk
The Crested Goshawk (Accipiter trivirgatus) doesn’t belong on a checklist of US backyard birds — it’s a resident of South and Southeast Asian forests, from India through China and down into Indonesia and the Philippines. Its inclusion here matters mainly for context: it demonstrates just how widespread the accipiter body plan is worldwide, using the same short, rounded wings and long tail that make Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks such effective forest hunters back home.
Important Note: The Crested Goshawk has no established wild population in the United States. Any sighting reported stateside would almost certainly involve a misidentified native accipiter or an escaped falconry bird rather than a genuine vagrant.
Physically, the species carries a short, blackish crest at the back of the crown — the feature that gives it its name — along with barred underparts and a stocky build typical of tropical forest accipiters. It hunts small birds, lizards, and insects from dense cover, mirroring the ambush strategy used by its North American relatives half a world away. Birders interested in comparing tropical forest raptors to equally colorful tropical songbirds like sunbirds will find both groups share the same humid, densely vegetated Asian forest habitat.
15. Black Kite
The Black Kite (Milvus migrans) rounds out this list as another species without an established US range, though it’s arguably the most numerous raptor on the planet across its actual Old World distribution spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Kites belong to the same broad family as the rest of this list — Britannica notes that hawks are small to medium-sized birds of prey in the family Accipitridae, which also includes kites, buzzards, and harriers.
Black Kites are opportunistic feeders almost to a fault, scavenging carrion, raiding garbage, and snatching insects — including swarming termites and wasps — on the wing whenever a food source presents itself. That adaptability, more than any single physical trait, explains why the species thrives everywhere from remote wetlands to crowded city edges across three continents.
Field identification relies on the shallowly forked tail, held twisted in flight, along with pale patches near the wingtips visible from below. Because North American range maps don’t include this species, any confirmed US sighting would be an exceptionally rare vagrant record worth reporting to a regional records committee.
Bringing It All Together
Sorting through the different types of hawks in the United States gets easier once you stop trying to memorize every species at once and start with silhouette and habitat. A soaring, broad-winged bird over open farmland is probably a buteo like a Red-tailed or Ferruginous Hawk; a fast, low flier weaving through trees is more likely an accipiter such as a Cooper’s or Sharp-shinned Hawk.
Range narrows things down fast, too — Harris’s Hawks and Zone-tailed Hawks belong to the Southwest, White-tailed Hawks to the Texas coast, and the Short-tailed Hawk almost exclusively to Florida. If a hawk ever turns up injured or grounded near your home, contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitator or an exotic animal veterinarian rather than attempting to handle the bird yourself, since federal protections make unauthorized possession illegal even with good intentions.
Pro Tip: Keep a simple field notebook logging date, location, and behavior for every hawk you spot. Over a season or two, those notes reveal patterns in migration timing and local hotspots that a single photo never will.
Whether it’s a Red-tailed Hawk perched on a highway sign or a rare Common Black Hawk working a desert stream, each of these 15 species fills a distinct niche shaped by millions of years of hunting strategy. Spend enough time watching the skies, and the differences that once looked subtle start to stand out on their own.