What it means
A Harris’s hawk is the big dark hawk you see in threes. Chocolate brown body, rust-red shoulders and leggings, long legs the color of a school bus, and a long tail with a bright white band at the base and tip. One perches on a saguaro arm, another on the next saguaro, a third on a light pole, and they are all related. No other common raptor in North America lives like that, which is why birders who move here get giddy about them and why locals point them out from the car: “Harris’s. There’ll be another one.”
The word you hear is simply “Harris’s” or, more often and less correctly, “Harris hawk.” Both refer to Parabuteo unicinctus, a bird of the brushy, saguaro-studded Sonoran Desert that has done well in the suburbs. The desert wildlife field guide lists it among the rewards of living here, alongside bobcats and roadrunners, and the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy documented it in the Preserve during its 2011 to 2013 survey of 128 bird species.
Where you’ll meet it
On the flat saguaro trails out of Brown’s Ranch, along Pima and Dynamite at dusk, on the grounds of the north Scottsdale resorts, and on power poles anywhere the city meets open desert. They do not migrate, so any month works, though the cooler mornings from October to April are when you are outside to see them.
Where the word came from
The name honors Edward Harris, a gentleman farmer from Moorestown, New Jersey, who met John James Audubon in 1824, bought his paintings when nobody else would, and later traveled with him to the Gulf of Mexico in 1837 and up the Missouri River in 1842. Audubon, who named birds after patrons the way universities name buildings, attached his friend’s name to the hawk. Before that it went by the dusky hawk or the bay-winged hawk.
What made the Harris’s hawk famous, though, is not the name but the behavior, and the behavior was documented here. Groups of two to six, sometimes nine in the Sonoran Desert where prey has good cover, hunt together: some birds flush a jackrabbit or a cottontail out of a cholla thicket, others wait on the far side, and the chase is handed off bird to bird until the rabbit tires. Larger kills are shared. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum calls them “wolves of the air,” and the research that measured it found that groups of two to four succeed about 10 percent more often per extra bird. Nesting is cooperative too; Audubon’s own guide notes that trios of two males and one female raise young together and that fledglings stay with the family for years. The remarkable part is that this is a regional habit. The species ranges from Arizona and Texas south to Chile and Argentina, and only the Sonoran Desert birds are known to hunt in packs.
That sociability is why the Harris’s hawk took over falconry. Since about 1980 it has been the most popular hawk in Western falconry: a bird that evolved to work with partners will work with a person. Trained Harris’s hawks now chase pigeons at Wimbledon and Trafalgar Square.
What it is not
It is not a red-tailed hawk, which is the other big hawk on Scottsdale light poles. Red-tails are pale underneath with a brick-red tail and almost always alone. It is also not Harris’s antelope squirrel, the striped ground squirrel on Preserve trails that was named for the same Edward Harris and that the hawk happily eats.
The fine print
Size first, since people guess high. A Harris’s hawk runs 18 to 23 inches long with a wingspan of roughly 40 to 47 inches; females are about a third heavier than males, around 2.3 pounds to 1.5. That is a medium-large hawk, smaller than a red-tail.
The social life has costs. Birds that perch shoulder to shoulder on a power pole are easy to electrocute, and the Tucson Bird Alliance notes that Tucson Electric Power retrofits poles for exactly that reason. Suburban nesting in palo verdes, mesquites and saguaros has helped the species spread into Phoenix and Tucson neighborhoods even as wild habitat shrinks; Audubon puts the global population near 920,000 and the status at Least Concern, while noting that it vanished from parts of its former range and that illegal taking for falconry once hurt it in places.
Locally the record is thin but real. The Conservancy’s 2014 report, the first full biological inventory of the Preserve, lists the Harris’s hawk among 128 bird species found between January 2011 and November 2013, with breeding confirmed for 24 species overall. It also notes that the Preserve has almost no surface water, which is why hawks concentrate where people have added it: golf courses, resort lakes and the Greenbelt. To watch a hunt, wait at a saguaro stand near a wash in the first hour of daylight. If a cottontail bolts and two hawks drop from two directions, you have seen the thing the textbooks describe, in Scottsdale, because it happens almost nowhere else.