Book Review: Hawks at a Distance

by Greg Neise on March 22, 2011

Anyone who has spent any amount of time at a hawk-watch site in North America knows the name Jerry Liguori. His raptor guide Hawks from Every Angle will be found somewhere—on a picnic table, or on the back seat of someone’s car—at every one. Hawks at a Distance: Identification of Migrant Raptors picks up where his previous guide left off.

Make no mistake. This is a guide for hawk-watchers. Part of an experiment I did with the last book I reviewed here, The Crossley ID Guide, was to leave it on the coffee table during a cocktail party. I wanted to see how folks (other than birders) reacted to it.

I inadvertently did the same thing with Hawks at a Distance, however the only person to peek at it was my wife. She flipped through a few pages, twisted her head this way and that and said, “hey…why are all the pictures so small?” Then set it back down. I tried to explain that this is the way we see hawks when they are migrating over, and the books depicts—very accurately—how they look high in the sky. “Well, they all look the same to me”, she said as she headed into the kitchen.

That’s the thing with migrating hawks, isn’t it? They do all look the same when they’re half a mile up and four miles away. Except that they aren’t all the same, and with practice and help, you can tell them apart. Hawks at a Distance is that help.

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we: the cover. It seems like a small thing, but I like the cover of this book. Not the design necessarily (which is quite nice) but the texture. Soft cover or “flexi-bound” books these days have smooth, almost sticky covers that allow amazing detail and color for the cover art. But they can get to feel just a tad slimy or tacky, especially if they are taken into the field where they get dirty.

This book has a sort of 60s-style grid pattern of minute raised bumps that give it a wonderful satiny feel. When I pulled it out of the shipping envelope that was the very first thing I noticed: it feels nice.

Digging in I discovered that it is exactly as I expected: fascinating and almost overwhelming. There are so many photos to take in. But hawk-watching is also fascinating and almost overwhelming. The introduction covers everything from optics to how to count and ethics. On each species page, the author uses a two-letter abbreviation to identify the plates, so Sharp-shinned Hawk plate #1 is “SS 01″. I would have preferred the standard 4-letter alpha code (Sharp-shinned is SSHA), but that’s a minor quibble.

On to hawk-watching. I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut when I’m at our local hawk-watch with the pros. If I call something, it’s like “I see a bird.” If I’m really confident and cocky, “…I got an accipiter.”

Accipiters, particularly Sharp-shinned Hawk, or “sharpies” are my bane at a hawk-watch. As it happens, the very first set of plates in Hawks at a Distance were the very ones I intended to scrutinize first: sharpies. I have seen quite literally tens of thousands of sharpies in my time, but still they can cause me trouble. A recent study on the west coast determined that up to 23% of male Cooper’s Hawks were misidentified as sharpies. Liguori has a page or so of text for each species followed by 1 – 6 color plates that look like this:

The page for Sharp-shinned Hawk describes the key points using adjectives like “small”, “short”, “stocky” and the flight characteristics as “buoyant”, “unsteady” and “quick and lack power”. Great description, especially the “quick and lack power” part. Other guides describe the sharpie’s flight as “flicking” or “fluttery”, but “lacking power” perfectly describes the difference between the flight characteristics of a sharpie compared to a Cooper’s Hawk’s “stiffer, less furious, powerful wing beats”.

By flipping back-and-forth between the 33 flight shots of Sharp-shinned and 24 similar shots of Cooper’s I got a really good feel for the subtle differences between these two species. I tried to show this to my wife, but I lost her when when I pointed out the differences between the shapes of their “hands”. “Birds don’t have hands…”, she said, and left again. Probably to get a drink.

Every species of hawk that regularly occurs in North America is treated like the Sharp-shinned and the Cooper’s (29 species in all), with numerous excellent photos showing every angle possible: top, bottom, wing-on, head-on, flying away—with excellent descriptions and insights from a master. The last few pages contain an array of black-and-white silhouettes of each species made from the photographs. Ligouri also tosses in some interesting comparisons that are sure to make you think: like the adult Goshawk among juvenile Gyrfalcons, and page 43, which compares Golden Eagle, Ferruginous, Rough-legged, Red-tailed, Swainson’s and Cooper’s Hawks with Northern Harrier as seen flying away from the observer.

Every birder with an interest in hawks should own this book (the soft-cover’s list price of $19.95 is a steal). And really, what birder isn’t interested in hawks? Show me a birder that doesn’t enjoy an afternoon at a good hawk-watch, and I’ll show you a dog that doesn’t like cheese.