An alert adult at the nest with the three chicks, all still completely covered in down, on May 26, 2024. All photographs by Wayne Smith, unless otherwise indicated.

Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus), an elegant, medium-sized raptor, is an unexciting find in most of Massachusetts. An adaptable bird as a breeder and as a transient, Red-shouldered hawk is relatively common in the Bay State—except, that is, on Cape Cod and the Massachusetts islands. The species is a scarce breeder and transient on the Cape and, in recent decades, has been virtually unheard of on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The historical status of this species on Marthas Vineyard proves to be different, however. In this article, we describe successful breeding by a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks in West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard, during the spring and summer of 2024. As far as we can determine, this is the first documented instance of breeding by this species on Martha’s Vineyard in more than a century.

Whiting and Pesch (2007) consider Red-shouldered Hawk to be “a very rare migrant” on Martha’s Vineyard, “[with] only four sightings since 1954.” This assessment is seconded by Veit and Petersen (1993), who describe the species as “absent as breeders from Cape Cod and the Islands, with one exception [Nashawena Island, 1975].” This source characterizes Red-shouldered Hawks as “uncommon to rare on Cape Cod and the Islands” as migrants and points out “the species’ preference for lowland deciduous forests and swampy wetlands.” Dykstra et al. (2020) characterize the typical breeding habitat of eastern Red-shouldered Hawks as ranging from “bottomland hardwood, riparian areas, and flooded deciduous swamps to upland mixed deciduous-coniferous forest.” Moist habitats such as those that dominate this list are of limited extent on Martha’s Vineyard and quite different from the habitat chosen by our subject pair, which nested in dry mixed oak woodland on morainal hills, in an area with low-density residential development. The species may also, like some other soaring birds, have an aversion to crossing large expanses of water, which would limit the likelihood of Red-shouldered Hawks visiting the Vineyard as migrants or recolonizing the island following extirpation.