Customer Reviews

Hawks in Flight: The Flight Identification of North American Migrant Raptors

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is no other guide which even approaches Hawks in Flight for thoroughness, clarity, and utility. Anyone who seriously pursues the sport of hawk watching must have this book.

For those just starting out in hawk watching, and for general use by even the most serious hawk watchers, I strongly recommend another work by Dunne et al., Hawk Watch: A Guide for Beginners, which is a large-format condensed version of Hawks in Flight. this book does focus exclusively on eastern species, however. Having both books is ideal.

A really great, useable book. Identifying a raptor is rarely difficult if you see it well. This book will help you learn to do it when you don't see the bird well.

When you devote 250 pages to just 23 species, you get to include a lot of information. But this isn't a book that's crammed with facts, figures, and field marks. The descriptions, line drawings, and photographs are intended to teach you how to tell these birds apart in the real world, where profile and silhouette usually matter more than detailed markings. And they work.

Although the coverage is a little biased toward the eastern U.S., this book is invaluable for distinguishing all of the buteos, accipiters, eagles, falcons, and vultures regularly found in North America, except for a number of extreme-southern species. And even if where you live you have to deal with White-tailed Hawks and Hook-billed Kites, and hope someday to find a Crane Hawk, at least this book will help you to become expert with the more widespread species.

This book gives excellent information on how to tell hawks apart with very little information. Peter Dunne's experience at hawk migration stations helped him to distill hawk identification keys and he presents the information in an interesting way. This is not your usual dry field guide.

HAWKS IN FLIGHT by Peter Dunne is a useful book because it includes many photos and drawings of various species of Raptors in flight. When you see a Raptor, you generally have no way to identify it except by it's flight profile. Feather markings simply cannot be seen when a bird is sailing on a current of air or scuttling after prey. Once in a while I've surprised a hawk at rest, but generally it is well hidden in the leaves of a tree and takes off before I can get a good look. Even the Cooper's Hawk I see on my morning commute along the parkway is usually sitting back on a branch waiting for road kill (he is one fat lazy bird).

The photos in HAWKS IN FLIGHT show the birds as seen from the side flying close to the ground and as well as overhead. The book also includes drawings showing birds that resemble each other juxtaposed side by side as they would never appear in nature. Some of the photos are not very clear and the drawings are darker than I like, but no less a birder than Roger Tory Petersen recommended this book which nicely complements his own books.

Although the title includes the reference to hawks, the chapters cover Buteos, Accipiters, Falcons, Kites, Harriers, Eagles, Ospreys, and Vultures. The chapter on Accipiters covers the Cooper's Hawk, the hawk I see by the roadside in Washington DC. We also see Falcons chasing our song birds. A whole lot of back-stabbing goes on in this town.

This book is a must have for any raptor fanatic. I used to be so confused on how to tell all those buteos apart, except when it was an obvious red tail. It is definatly worth the money, it is not meant to be a "ooh look at the pretty pictures kind of bird book", it is a holistic approach to identification, you learn about flight traits of each raptor, overall impression, plumage, etc. Read the whole thing so you really get whats going on. I am much more confident and knowledgeable after having studied this book. Buy it, worth it.

This is a really interesting book. It has some photographs (which have inspired me to get out to Cape May and other cool birding havens) but most of the pictures are black & white drawings. The detail I think is actually pretty good. The drawings do not give specific detail of color shading etc but instead provide the broader strokes of major markings or wing shape or how the bird might look looking down at you. There are head-on profiles (in different modes of flight), some top down drawings, but mostly looking up and side. The raptors are segmented into the different groups of Buteos, Accipters Falcons, Kites, Northern Harrier, Eagles & Vultures, and Osprey. Within each section each bird has a few pages with pictures and really neat info about their migration patterns as well as tips for id.

I'm still not very good at id of these birds but I love watching them and trying to id them. This book is a really good resource!

Buteo identification has always been a challenge for me, but over the Christmas Day Birdcount I was able to get an identification I would have never gotten without the volume. The subtle parsing of the various colors, sizes, behaviors, etc. of raptors makes this more useful then a field guide for understanding on what you should be focusing when catching that 5 or 6 seconds of "flying away raptor".

Another reviewer mentioned the grainy photographs, which is dead-on. Unfortunately, I have to say that those photographs are (approximately) how I am seeing most of these birds. So, they are an odd bit of help, really.

Hawks In Flight is not only a must-read for its content about hawk identification in the field, but is a delightful addition to our library of books about nature. The authors use colorful language, apt imagery and a sense of humor to give readers/birders a feeling of "can-do" in the discipline of species identification.

Of the dozen or so raptor identification books I own, I have learned the most from this book. The standard Peterson's guides work pretty well if you can get within 50 feet of a sitting bird, or if you use a gun as an accessory. However for most of us, you need to be able to work from a lot further away than that. Dunne takes you beyond plumage clues to descriptions of flight cadence, behaviour, posture, and relative body proportions. He discards the trivial details not visible from less than a hundred feet. He emphasizes what is still obvious in a backlit, soaring bird even miles away. On top of that he offers visual analogies that are cool 'sound bites' to help you remember features of the species. For example think of the flying 'stovepipe', the Northern Goshawk, or the 'arthritic' wingbeats of the Cooper's hawk. These clues offer the kind of practical wisdom that a seasoned birder will use.

The only minor point I would make is that I found a few of the sentences a little hard to understand. However, like most good teachers, he explains important details more than once in slightly different form, so that understanding of key points is clear. This book is definitely a winner.

"Hawks in Flight" is a different kind of ID field guide. Most guides feature many colored plates and or photographs of the birds. That is very useful if you are within a reasonable distance from the bird and the light is decent.

However, with birds of prey, you frequently see them from a considerable distance and from below. Most of the time you only get a good idea of their shape and flight characteristics. That is where this book comes in handy. Featuring nothing but B&W drawings (David Sibley) and B&W photos, "Hawks in Flight" shows you the bird as you will likely see it - a shape consisting of just a few colors (white, grey, black, brown) featuring some defining marks.

The authors also do a great job of describing what are the defining marks of each species and also telling you how to make a determination between similar birds (featuring B&W photos next to each other).

Highly Recommended