home     galleries     new     equipment     links     about    contact


White-tailed hawk        Images © Mark A. Chappell

The white-tailed hawk is a large, stocky, short-tailed buteo that occurs in the US only in south Texas.   The adults are lovely birds, strikingly marked in gray and white, with rusty 'shoulders' and a neat touch of black trim; they have a 'helmet' of dark feathers on top of the head that is reminiscent of a peregrine falcon.   Young birds are quite different: mostly brownish with a pale rump and typically a white area on the chest.   These white-tails were perched on fenceposts and power poles near the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge in south Texas.   Pictures of flying birds are on another page.

  • Canon 1D4, 800mm IS lens with 1.4X converter, some with fill-in flash (2014)