Hawk is a medium-sized ,strong, powerful birds. Their feet are equipped with sharp, curved talons for capturing prey, and their strong beaks are hooked for biting and tearing flesh. Swift fliers, some hawks can attain speeds of over 150 mph when diving. There are around 270 species of hawks .Generally, hawks kill their prey with their claws, unlike the falcons, which catch prey with the claws but kill with a blow of their beak. However, despite their fierce reputations, some hawks are quiet and gentle. Hawks have many foraging techniques, but the most typical in their pursuit of prey is raking, or swiftly following the animal’s efforts to escape. Once the hawk has secured the prey with its powerful talons, the bird dismembers it with its sharply pointed strong beak.
Hawks are unusual among birds in that the female is generally larger than her mate. In some species, this difference—called sexual dimorphism—can be as great as the female being twice the size of the males, as in the accipiters. So many other factors correlate with sexual dimorphism, it is difficult to say which is the major contributing factor. Hawks generally mate for life, and are strongly attached to their nesting territory; one pair of red-shouldered hawks (and their offspring) used the same area for 45 years. Not only do they have acute vision but they are very intelligent. A Canadian scientist devised a method of measuring avian IQ in terms of their innovation in feeding habits, and hawks were named among the most intelligent birds based on this scale.
Credit : Science.jrank
Picture Credit : Google
