by Eric Halloran

Created on: January 09, 2010

Sighting a raptor, or predatory bird, can be very exciting.  Most predators are stealthy and stalk their prey or from cover.  We rarely get to witness a bobcat or fox hunting even though it is a commonplace occurrence.  On the other hand, many predatory birds hunt from the sky or from tree limbs and telephone poles right out in the open.  If you drive any distance in rural and even suburban North America, you will probably have several opportunities to see raptors.  But how can you tell if you are watching a hawk or a falcon?  And what is the difference, anyway?

In nature, form follows function.  The principal difference between a hawk and a falcon concerns it's style of hunting and killing the prey.  In general, falcons will hunt on the wing from above.  A peregrine falcon, for example, will fly very actively, rowing the air with her wings, to gain altitudes of several hundreds to thousands of feet.  When she has reached what she considers a reasonable height, she'll continue to fly in circles to maintain that vantage point until she sees an opportunity to take her prey.

Her preferred food is duck and so you are likely to observe her near water.  But she cannot take a duck on the water.  And her method of capture would mean her own end in the case of a duck on the ground or in a tree.  She has mounted this incredibly high vantage point for two reasons: first, because she is only a speck in the sky and not easily observed by her prey; and second, because she can very quickly convert the height into speed to overtake her prey on the wing.

When a duck flies under her, she will head down, taking a few wing beats to aid her initial acceleration and then tuck into an aerodynamic teardrop shape reaching incredible speeds and strike the duck with her chest and feet, smack, like a fist.  The impact usually will stun the prey which falls to the ground.  Sometimes, the initial impact or the impact with the ground is sufficient to kill the duck.  In any case, the falcon will slow her screaming descent but reserve some inertia sufficient to enable her to very quickly land on the torso of the duck and dispatch it by using her beak to sever the vertebrae of the neck.  She is not able to carry her prey, so she will picnic right there at the site of the kill.

A hawk will confine it's hunting activities almost exclusively to ground dwelling animals or birds just taking wing.  A red-tailed

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