Finnish Focus On... Goshawk

There's a game I like to play, whenever I have Irish birders visiting here or I'm in continental Europe birding with other Irish birders.

I call this game "What made that a Goshawk?"

I play this game when we come across a Goshawk whilst driving, which is the most frequent manner of seeing them, where you often have only seconds to ID one.

I played this game recently when Cathal Forkan and Joe Proudfoot visited.

Driving around ring 1 in Helsinki, Joe picked up a Goshawk sitting on a lamp post. We zoomed by, but both lads were happy it was a Gos. So I asked the question. "What made that a Goshawk?"

Juvenile/1st winter Goshawk - Juvs are pretty easy and distinctive in their way. However I have often gotten the first impression that I have a harrier on my hands rather than a Gos. Their overall coloration is striking in this regard.

The answer to this question?

"It was f*ckin massive"

...and that, believe it or not, was the right answer. It's a perfectly honest, acceptable answer. However, as I pointed out, it's an answer that would fail to pass a dreaded rarity committee.

This is where things get, what undoubtedly committee men will say is blasphemous. Goshawk is not hard to ID. *GASP* *SWOON* *HOW DARE YOU!* GLOVE SLAP ACROSS THE FACE*

A head on view of a 1st year Gos should pose no ID problem. Note the blood stains. Evidence of monstrosity.

Goshawk juv - The incredible upperparts patterning of Juv Gos should make it relatively straightforward, but I have wondered whether those with less experience could write one off as a buzzard.

It's true though. Goshawk is not hard to ID. The problem lies in the divide between what it takes to ID Goshawk in the field, under real life conditions, and what it takes to get the species past a committee. The bar for acceptance does not match what you typically see on a Goshawk in daily life.

Over the past 4 years of living in Finland, I've tried to break down how I see Goshawks on a daily basis, in real life.

This is not necessarily easy. There are peaks of migration which can skew patterns. However, generally speaking, you see Goshawk in much the same way you see Sparrowhawk, whizzing past you as you drive, or crossing your path at speed whilst out walking.

Goshawk is a far more terrestrial species than Sparrowhawk, however, and the number of times you will flush a Goshawk from a ditch or undergrowth is also high, with immature birds being particularly reluctant to leave a kill.

Even with the naked eye, a Goshawk on the deck is an obvious thing. A behemoth in a garden setting.

On many occasions, in a woodland setting, I have flushed a Gos from the undergrowth. When this happens, the first impression can often be that you have flushed one of the gamebirds, a grouse or pheasant, before the bird levels out into typical Gos flight and the woodland erupts in alarm calls.

The above image is a handheld mobile-phone photo and is the same bird as above, in a suburban garden setting. For me, even with the naked eye, all the size and structural clues are there. Easy to say seeing them so regularly perhaps, but it is what it is.

The number of times you come across a perched bird, where you can actually stop and look at it/photograph it, is relatively low, and I only manage it with any level of frequency due to the massively high density of the species around Helsinki.

Many years ago, this article by Keith Vinicombe was hailed as THE reference on Goshawk ID and it's pitfalls, and whilst there are no issues described in the various ID features discussed, I instantly saw an issue in the manner in which viewing Goshawks was described.

Perhaps, in Britain, birders only see or look for Goshawk at distance, maybe only searching for displaying birds in February/March, from raptor watchpoints? In which case I could see the case for frequent mis-identification, however this does not come close to my experience of seeing Gos here in Finland, elsewhere in Europe and Ireland.

Nor should it. The old myth of Goshawk being a pure forest species is long buried, even mentioned in that article as colonizing cities in Europe, but long before they were taking to urban areas, they were frequenting areas with congregations of prey species, such as estuaries and wetlands, and coastal headlands, exactly the sort of areas where records in Ireland have been represented in recent decades.

Goshawk - Reedbed and wetland habitat. It should surprise no one that in areas with large wetlands and lots of waders, such species feature highly on the seasonal menu.

I also cannot hold with that articles assessment of descriptions and the criticism of "lack of plumage features". When watching two birds at Viiki with the two Irish visitors, I purposefully asked the guys what plumage features could be seen on these birds, in real time, whilst we were viewing them.

Despite these birds being relatively close to us, only at high zoom could I begin to make out details of the underparts body-barring, and maybe once picked up the pattern of the remiges on a particularly angled bank, and this was on birds circling and hunting over the fields, completely unrepresentative in my experience of the typical fly-by viewing, where you have orders of magnitude less time to make an identification.

I don't mind saying I would be skeptical of someone who said they DID nail such features without the aid of a digital camera and a big lens.

Does this mean that this multitude of gargantuan accipters dashing in front of my car are not Goshawks or not identified to a high standard?

No. They are what they are, and I suspect that most birders, seeing Goshawk regularly, rely on the key structural features they grow familiar with (validly discussed in the linked article). And there's nothing wrong with that. Call me old fashioned.