A pair of Short-tailed Hawks lingers on Mt. Bigelow through breeding season

A Short-tailed Hawk has held its ground on Mt.¹ Bigelow Road for the better part of two weeks, with 71 separate confirmed reports and repeat sightings of two birds together as recently as August 27.¹ The persistence is the real story. This is a species built around Florida and the humid tropics, with only a scattered foothold in south Texas; a single bird passing through the sky islands of southeastern Arizona would already be notable, but a pair lingering through late summer, the peak of the breeding window, raises the question of whether something more than passage is underway.

Short-tailed Hawks hunt on the wing, soaring high over forest edges and dropping suddenly on birds below, a technique that has earned them comparisons to a falcon more than a typical buteo. Nesting requires mature stands with tall trees, and this stretch of the Catalina Highway corridor still supplies that structure as it climbs from desert floor into pine-oak and mixed conifer forest. The land underneath is federal. PAD-US puts the corridor inside Coronado National Forest, and records a Catalina Highway Scenic Area unit — 15,537 acres in total extent, managed by the Forest Service — at GAP status 3: protected from outright conversion, but still open to extraction such as logging, grazing or mining.² The surrounding national forest carries the same status. That is a step below the GAP 1 wilderness units a short distance away, Pusch Ridge and Rincon Mountain among them, where land is managed for biodiversity and natural disturbance is allowed to run its course.² For a raptor that depends on old, standing timber, which management regime governs the trees it is using matters as much as whether the trees are there at all.

The species' nesting habits are poorly documented even within its core range, which makes this sighting more than a checklist entry. Whether this pair is simply lingering or actually attempting to nest is a question worth watching carefully over the coming weeks, ideally from a distance that leaves the birds undisturbed.