What Do Hawks Eat? Diet of Red-Tailed and Other Hawks

What do red-tailed hawks eat?

The red-tailed hawk is an opportunistic hunter of small animals on the ground. Rodents usually form the bulk of its diet, often up to about 85% of prey. Common prey includes:

• Rodents: voles, deer mice, house mice, rats, pocket gophers, chipmunks, ground squirrels and tree squirrels such as the eastern gray squirrel.
• Rabbits and hares: cottontails and young jackrabbits; occasionally even adult jackrabbits, which weigh more than the hawk.
• Birds: pigeons, quail, starlings, blackbirds, pheasants and occasionally ducks.
• Reptiles and amphibians: garter snakes, rat snakes, lizards and frogs.
• Other prey: shrews, bats, crayfish, large insects and earthworms.

In cities, red-tails catch brown rats, pigeons and squirrels in parks and along railway lines. On some Caribbean islands, where native land mammals are scarce, they eat mainly snakes and lizards.

How hawks hunt

Most hawks hunt with their feet. They catch prey with long, curved talons and kill it by squeezing, while the hooked bill is used to tear food into pieces. Different groups of hawks use different methods:

• Buteos such as the red-tailed, red-shouldered and rough-legged hawks often perch-hunt. They sit on a tree, pole or fence post, scan the ground, then glide down onto prey. They also hunt while soaring, or by hanging in the wind in a hover called kiting.
• Accipiters such as Cooper’s hawks, sharp-shinned hawks and northern goshawks are ambush hunters. They have short, rounded wings and long tails for weaving through trees, and they burst from cover to surprise birds and squirrels.
• Harriers fly low and slowly over marshes and fields, using hearing as well as sight to find voles and small birds.

After a meal, a hawk often sits quietly for hours while it digests. Like owls, hawks cough up pellets of fur, feathers and other parts they cannot digest, although their strong stomach acids dissolve more bone than an owl’s do. Hawks get most of the water they need from their food, but they also drink and bathe in streams and puddles.

Different hawks, different diets

In Europe the picture is similar. The common buzzard, a close relative of the red-tail, eats mainly voles and other small mammals, while the Eurasian sparrowhawk is a small-bird specialist much like the sharp-shinned hawk. For help telling these groups apart, see our guide to hawks of North America.

How hawk diets change with the seasons

What a hawk eats changes through the year. In spring and summer, red-tailed hawks feed their chicks a wide range of prey, and snakes, young rabbits, ground squirrels and fledgling birds become more common in the diet as these animals become active. Insects are plentiful in summer, and some hawks catch many grasshoppers and beetles.

In winter, snakes and frogs are hidden away, so northern red-tails rely heavily on voles and mice, which stay active under the snow, and on rabbits and squirrels. Hunting becomes harder in deep snow, and hawks may turn to carrion or move south. Swainson’s hawks change their diet completely: they eat mostly rodents while nesting in western North America, then switch to grasshoppers and dragonflies on their wintering grounds in Argentina.

Hawks and rodent control

Because rodents are such a large part of their diet, hawks are valuable to farmers and city dwellers alike. A single red-tailed hawk family can catch large numbers of voles, mice and gophers in a breeding season, and in winter hawks perched along highway edges and field margins are often hunting rodents that damage crops. Daytime hunting hawks and nighttime hunting owls such as the barn owl together keep pressure on rodents around the clock.

This role also puts hawks at risk. Rat poisons can build up in hawks that eat poisoned rodents, causing internal bleeding and death. In New York City, two of the mates of the famous hawk Pale Male died after eating poisoned rats or pigeons. Protecting hawks therefore means thinking about the whole food chain they depend on.

Do hawks eat other hawks?

Sometimes. Larger raptors occasionally prey on smaller ones: great horned owls kill red-tailed hawks of all ages, and red-tails occasionally take kestrels or small owls. Competition can also lead to theft, as eagles and larger hawks steal kills from smaller birds of prey.