Gray Hawk

How to find it

Look along forest edges and in semi-open country, and check roadside wires as you travel. It often calls, so listen for a clear whistle. Scan broken forest, tree edges and clearings for a gray hawk sitting upright. In the hot mid-morning, watch the sky when vultures rise on thermals, since Gray Hawks sometimes soar with them, though they are just as often seen at habitat edges. Loud mobbing by songbirds can give away a hidden hawk. A Guanacaste biologist says he sees Gray Hawks often while driving the roads of Guanacaste.

How to recognise it

Adults are pale gray with plain gray upperparts and no pattern. The tail is black with three white bands, and the legs are orange.

It is a compact hawk with short, rounded wings and a long tail. It flies with quick flaps and short glides.

Young birds look quite different. They are brown above and streaked or spotted below. They show a bold face pattern, paler underwings and a small white patch at the base of the upper tail.

What it sounds like

Recording: Adriana Nelly Correa Sandoval, CC BY 4.0, source, read 4 Nov 2026.

Behaviour and diet

The Gray Hawk eats mostly lizards and small snakes, dropping onto them from an exposed perch, and it is usually seen alone. It ambushes prey from a perch in scattered trees.

Costa Rican researchers have recorded one catching a Squirrel Cuckoo, and another taking a Variegated Squirrel, a mammal of more than 500 grams. Songbirds react to it: a Tropical Kingbird chased a hunting Gray Hawk, and kiskadees and Brown Jays joined in with alarm calls.

Where it lives

In Costa Rica the Gray Hawk is a bird of the north and northwest. It prefers broken forest, scattered trees and forest edges to solid forest, so look in semi-open country rather than inside rainforest or cloud forest.

Across its wider range it lives in riverside scrub forest and also uses forest edges, river edges, savanna, clearings and farmland. A raptor-migration study lists it as a common resident of lowland habitats.

Similar birds

The southern Costa Rican bird, including the Osa area, was once treated as the same species and is now the separate Gray-lined Hawk (Buteo nitidus). Expect Gray Hawk only in the north. The two are hard for most people to tell apart, though the Gray-lined has a few more gray bars on the upperparts and a slightly wider white tail band. The Gray Hawk's alarm call is longer and lower, with a more nasal tone. Young Gray Hawks look like young Broad-winged and Red-shouldered Hawks, but have a stronger face pattern, paler underwings and a small white patch at the tail base.

Names and lore in Costa Rica

The official Spanish name is Gavilán Gris, and the AOCR list gives Gavilán Pollero as the common Costa Rican name. Pollero means chicken-hawk, a name often given to hawks that take poultry. Other Spanish names in use across the range include aguililla gris, halcón gris and azor mexicano, and gavilán saraviado is also listed.

Status and conservation

The AOCR list marks the Gray Hawk as a resident (R), and the IUCN lists it as Least Concern.