The Red-shouldered Hawk is a strikingly marked forest hawk, warmly colored with rusty-barred underparts, reddish "shoulders," and boldly black-and-white checkered wings and tail that flash in flight. A bird of mature, often wet woodlands — bottomland forests, wooded swamps, and riverine woods — it hunts from a perch beneath the canopy, dropping onto frogs, snakes, small mammals, and other prey. Its loud, ringing "kee-yah, kee-yah" call is one of the classic sounds of eastern woodlands, and Blue Jays are notorious for imitating it.
In southern Michigan Red-shouldered Hawks are year-round residents of mature forest, while farther north they are chiefly summer breeders that migrate south for winter. They favor bigger, older, wetter woods than the open-country Red-tailed Hawk, and the loss and fragmentation of such forest reduced their numbers in the past, making them a species of special concern in parts of the region. Where mature bottomland forest persists, their spring calls carry far through the trees.
Hunts from perches in wet woodland, taking small mammals such as voles and chipmunks along with frogs, snakes, salamanders, crayfish, and small birds. It favors the amphibians and reptiles of forested wetlands, adjusting its diet to whatever prey is seasonally abundant near water.
The Red-shouldered is slimmer, with rusty-barred underparts, reddish shoulders, and boldly black-and-white banded wings and tail. The Red-tailed is bulkier with a pale chest, a dark belly band, and (in adults) a rusty tail, and it favors open country rather than forest.
The Red-shouldered Hawk's loud, ringing "kee-yah" is a favorite of mimicking Blue Jays, which may use it to warn of a real hawk or to clear competitors from a feeding area. Hearing the call does not always mean a hawk is present.
In mature, often wet deciduous and mixed forests — bottomlands, wooded swamps, and riverine woods. It is a year-round resident in southern Michigan and a summer breeder farther north.
Juveniles are brown above with a heavily streaked breast and lack the adult's rusty shoulders and orange barred underparts, though the pale crescent 'windows' near the wingtips show at every age. Adult plumage arrives after the first year.
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