Good day, friends.  This week’s bird is the gray-lined hawk, and boy, is it.  Mature birds are up to 61cm (24in) in length, weigh about 475 grams or 16.8 oz on average and are positively festooned with gray and white stripes.  Juveniles look much different, with brown mottling across their entire bodies.  The American Ornithological Society has declared it a separate species from the gray hawk, a similar bird which nonetheless has a range that does not overlap with that of its gray-lined relative. I was not able to find out when this occurred, but writing these headers has taught me that changes like this are often recent and determined by examining the genes of the birds in question to find differences there. 

The gray-lined hawk is found in Costa Rica and much of South America, including Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and into Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay.  I found one source that says it has a small range in the US, but was not able to find any corroborating information. 

The bird lives in a variety of habitats including savannahs, forest edges, pastures with trees and something called a gallery forest.  A gallery forest is a forest that forms a corridor alongside wetlands or rivers, and spreads dense vegetation to areas where it would otherwise be less dense, like deserts, grasslands, and the aforementioned savannah.  The hawk hunts by perching high in a tree and swooping down on prey; it also catches prey on the wing during its characteristic low glide.  The gray-lined hawk is a fairly opportunistic predator, hunting a wide variety of meals.  It eats snakes, lizards, frogs, small mammals, quail and doves, fish and insects.  

Nests are built out of leaves and twigs and lined with fresh leaves.  The nests can be placed in evergreen trees and sometimes in dead trees, although hopefully not both.  Building a nest in a dead coniferous tree sounds like a recipe for disaster.  Between one and four eggs are laid at a time, and after hatching the new birds will live in the nest for about 42 days before they are ready to fly.  Parents will aggressively defend the nest during this time, especially from other raptors.  

In my quest to end these headers on a positive note, I came across the following quote from philosopher William James, “Act as if what you do makes a difference.  It does.”  No matter what is going on in the world around us, the good we do matters.  

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