Red-tailed Hawk vs Red-shouldered Hawk

Listen to the texture and count the notes. A Red-tailed Hawk gives one long, hoarse, rasping cry of two to three seconds that starts high and slides down, kree-eee-ar, usually from a bird soaring over open country. A Red-shouldered Hawk gives a clearer, whistled kee-yeeear and usually repeats it three or four times in a row, from wet woods, most of all in spring. One catch: in the East, Blue Jays often copy the red-shoulder's call almost perfectly, so find the bird before you decide.

Side by side

By ear: one rasp or a string of whistles

The Red-tailed Hawk's cry is one most people know without knowing it. It is a drawn-out scream of two to three seconds, hoarse and rasping rather than clean, starting high and slurring downward: Audubon writes it keeeeer, Wikipedia kree-eee-ar, and the usual comparison is a steam whistle. It is often used as the generic raptor sound on television and in other media, even when the bird on screen is something else. Red-tails call most while hunting or soaring, and loudest when a predator or a rival hawk enters the territory.

The Red-shouldered Hawk sounds cleaner and more insistent. Its scream, kee-yeeear in Audubon's spelling and kee-aah in Wikipedia's, is shrill and whistled and falls in pitch, and it usually comes in a run of three or four. The calling is heaviest in courtship and territory defense, so spring is when it stands out: males fly upward calling and then dive steeply, and pairs circle high over the nesting woods, calling as they go. Audubon notes that the bird is often heard before it is seen.

So the test is texture and count. A long, raspy scream sliding downward, from a bird turning circles over a field, is a red-tail. A clear, whistled phrase repeated again and again from the trees along a creek or a swamp is a red-shoulder, or a jay.

By sight: tail, shoulders and wingtips

An adult Red-tailed Hawk has a reddish-brown tail, reddish above and whitish below, and the color shows even from underneath when the bird flies over. Most eastern red-tails have a white chest crossed by a dark band of streaks on the belly, and from below the leading edge of the inner wing looks dark. An adult Red-shouldered Hawk has reddish shoulders and a reddish chest, and its tail and flight feathers are banded in narrow black and white. West Coast birds are redder, Florida birds paler.

The red-tail is the bulkier hawk, broad-winged and built for soaring, with a wingspan Audubon puts at 45 to 52 inches against about 40 for the red-shoulder. The red-shoulder often flies with several quick flaps and a glide, a rhythm that can suggest an accipiter, and at every age it shows a pale crescent near each wingtip in flight.

Young birds are harder. A young red-tail has a brown tail with dark bars instead of a red one, and young eastern red-shoulders are brown too, with narrow tail bars. Check the wingtips for the red-shoulder's crescent and the belly for the red-tail's band.

Where you will meet each one

Audubon calls the Red-tailed Hawk the most widespread and familiar large hawk in North America. It needs open ground for hunting and high places to sit: woodland with clearings, prairie groves, plains, mountains, desert with a few trees, and the utility poles along a road. It is absent from unbroken forest and the high Arctic. Many central and southern birds, adults especially, stay all year, while northern birds may migrate far south.

The Red-shouldered Hawk lives in the woods, usually wet ones. In the East look for it in tall deciduous and mixed forest with an open understory, often along rivers and swamps, and in Florida in pine woods and mangroves; in winter it may use more open places. In the West it breeds along the California coast in riverside forest, oak woodland, eucalyptus groves and some neighborhoods. Most stay all year; only northern birds migrate.

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated October 14, 2026.