RED-TAILED HAWK PORTRAIT

 

Quite a few years ago, I visited a falconer friend to make studies and sketches of his birds. This partial-albino Red-tailed Hawk was the one that interested me the most and my sketchbooks are full of hawk drawings. It was a first-year bird, almost completely white but with quite a few ‘normal’ head feathers along with the odd darker one here and there. The tail was of a normal juvenile (barred) but much lighter than usual. Apparently these very pale birds appear in about 5% of the overall Red-tailed Hawk population. All show varying amounts of white but this is the whitest one that I have seen. Most have been birds with the usual plumage features but with a much lighter overall tone, some are the opposite being quite dark and I have made some studies of a sooty-looking dull-greyish bird. The underparts though were slightly lighter and it still had its usual red tail found on adult birds although this was darker than usual. This plumage variation is common amongst the buteo genus.

I remember starting with some quick sketches done from a respectable distance. I found this hawk to be a very docile bird which meant that I was able to approach and examine it closely without any nervousness, and moving the bird into sunlight helped bring out more of its character. So far I have completed quite a few paintings of this bird, this one was done in watercolor so as to try and capture the softness of the plumage. In this portrait, as I was only concerned with my thoughts and interactions with the bird, I kept the background simple and concentrated on bringing out the essence of this wonderful hawk. Size is about 8 x 11 in. (20 x 28cm).