Autour d'Amérique— Quebec wildlife

The American goshawk (Astur atricapillus) is a species of raptor in the family Accipitridae. It was first described by Alexander Wilson in 1812. The American goshawk was previously considered conspecific with the Eurasian goshawk but was assigned to a separate species in 2023 based on differences in morphology, vocalizations, and genetic divergence. It was formerly placed in the genus Accipiter. It is mainly resident, but birds from colder regions migrate south for the winter. In North America, migratory goshawks are often seen migrating south along mountain ridge tops at nearly any time of the fall depending on latitude.

Habitat and range

In North America, they are most broadly found in the Western United States, including Alaska, and western Canada. Their breeding range in the western contiguous United States largely consists of the wooded foothills of the Rocky Mountains and many other large mountain ranges from Washington to southern California extending east to central Colorado and westernmost Texas. Somewhat discontinuous breeding populations are found in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, thence also somewhat spottily into western Mexico down through Sonora and Chihuahua along the Sierra Madre Occidental as far as Jalisco and Guerrero, their worldwide southern limit as a breeding species. The goshawk continues east through much of Canada as a native species, but is rarer in most of the Eastern United States, especially the Midwest, where they are not typically found outside the Great Lakes region, where a good-sized breeding population occurs in the northern parts of Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, and somewhat into Ohio; a very small population persists in the extreme northeast corner of North Dakota. They breed also in mountainous areas of New England, New York, central Pennsylvania, and northwestern New Jersey, sporadically down to extreme northwestern Maryland and northeastern West Virginia. Vagrants have been reported in most of the parts of the United States in which they do not breed.