Red-shouldered Hawk (Falco borealis, Gmelin.), Volume 1, Plate 56

Painted in Louisiana in 1821 and later reworked.

One of Audubon’s most dramatically rendered scenes. Recognizing its narrative power, Audubon and Havell left the background white. Audubon portrays a fight between birds of the same species, with the male swooping down to snatch the prey the larger female has procured. Note how Audubon arranges his birds in a kind of descending column, encouraging the viewer’s eye to travel downward from hawk to hawk to, finally, the helplessly defecating rabbit. By exposing the female’s white underside, Audubon links her to the white-bellied rabbit and establishes a correspondence between predator and prey, suggesting that, depending on the context-anyone, no matter how fierce-may become a victim. The accompanying essay describes a farmer taking revenge on the bird that has done some damage to his poultry by cutting down the tree on which the hawk nests.

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

[The Red-tailed Hawk’s] flight is firm, protracted, and at times performed at a great height. It sails across the whole of a large plantation, on a level with the tops of the forest-trees which surround it, without a single flap of its wings, and is then seen moving its head sidewise to inspect the objects below. This flight is generally accompanied by a prolonged mournful cry, which may be heard at a considerable distance, and consists of a single sound resembling the monosyllable Kae, uttered in such a manner as to continue for three or four minutes, without any apparent inflection or difference of intensity. It would seem as if uttered for the purpose of giving notice to the living objects below that he is passing, and of thus inducing them to bestir themselves and retreat to a hiding-place, before they attain which he may have an opportunity of pouncing upon one of them. When he spies an animal, while he is thus sailing over a field, I have observed him give a slight check to his flight, as if to mark a certain spot with accuracy, and immediately afterwards alight on the nearest tree. He would then instantly face about, look intensely on the object that had attracted his attention, soon after descend towards it with wings almost close to his body, and dart upon it with such accuracy and rapidity as seldom to fail in securing it.