High above the sun-scorched valleys of the American Southwest, a , known to the world below as the Red-tailed Hawk , carved invisible circles into the rising heat. Her name, according to the scientists who first studied her kind in 1781, was a tribute to Jamaica , yet she was a queen of the entire North American continent.
She was built for the air, a master of soaring and kiting . With a wingspan stretching nearly four feet, she didn't need to flap; she simply let the thermals carry her three-pound frame higher until the world became a tapestry of textures. Her eyes, eight times more powerful than a human’s, scanned the ground from hundreds of feet up, detecting the slightest twitch of a field mouse’s ear in the tall grass. buteo jamaicensis
She returned to her nest, a massive structure of sticks tucked high in the fork of a sturdy cottonwood tree. There, her white-downed young waited, their "klee-uk" cries echoing the rasping, iconic scream of their mother—the sound Hollywood uses to represent the voice of almost every eagle or hawk. High above the sun-scorched valleys of the American