Common Black Hawk
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| Common Black Hawk | ||||||||||||||
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| Buteogallus anthracinus (Deppe, 1830) |
The Common Black Hawk (Buteogallus anthracinus) is a bird of prey in the family Accipitridae, which also includes the eagles, hawks and Old World vultures.
The Common Black Hawk is a breeding bird in the tropical New World, from the southwestern U.S. through Central America to Venezuela, Peru, Trinidad and the Lesser Antilles.
This is a mainly coastal, resident bird of mangrove swamps, estuaries and adjacent dry open woodland, though there are inland populations, including a migratory population in northwestern Mexico and Arizona.
The adult Common Black Hawk is 43–53 cm long and weighs 930g on average. It has very broad wings, and is mainly black or dark gray. The short tail is black with a single broad white band and a white tip. The bill is black and the legs and cere are yellow.
Sexes are similar, but immature birds are dark brown above with spotting and streaks. Their underparts are buff to whitish with dark blotches, and the tail has a number of black and white bars.
The Common Black Hawk feeds mainly on crabs, but will also take small vertebrates and eggs. This species is often seen soaring, with occasional lazy flaps, and has a talon-touching aerial courtship display. The call of the Common Black Hawk is a distinctive piping spink-speenk-speenk-spink-spink-spink.
It builds a platform nest of sticks at middle or upper heights in a tree, often a mangrove. It lays one to three eggs (usually one), which are whitish with brown markings.
The shorter-winged Mangrove Black Hawk is considered to be subspecies of Common Black Hawk by some authors. The Cuban Black-Hawk was also recently split from B. anthracinus (AOU 2007).
[edit] Protection status
The Common Black Hawk is protected in the far north of its range (in the USA) under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.[1]
[edit] References
- BirdLife International (2004). Buteogallus anthracinus. 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. Retrieved on 11 May 2006. Database entry includes justification for why this species is of least concern
- Birds of Venezuela by Hilty, ISBN 0-7136-6418-5
- ffrench, Richard (1991). A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago, 2nd edition, Comstock Publishing. ISBN 0-8014-9792-2.
- Howell, Steve N. G. (1995). A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-854012-4.
[edit] External links
- Common Black Hawk videos on the Internet Bird Collection
- Stamps (for Grenadines of Saint Vincent, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines) with RangeMap
- "Common Black-Hawk" photo gallery
