I have a friend who measures outings in red-tailed hawks. “It was a five-hawk drive,” she’ll exclaim after visiting a bucolic setting. That’s an easy image to conjure: fierce hawks perched high on ...

Red-tails are easy to identify, except when they aren't: All adults show the distinctive red tail, so if you observe a big hawk with a red tail, it's a red-tailed hawk. But the opposite is not ...