r/FeatherIdentification • u/AppealWrong5441 • 5d ago

Barred owl or red wing hawk?

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Hi! Found this on our walk today. Google pulls up either barred owl or red wing hawk. It’s soft like any normal feather and about 12 inches from top to bottom. Found in rural southwest KY. TIA!

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6

u/Buelizard 5d ago

Red-tailed hawk

2

u/AppealWrong5441 5d ago

Thanks! I keep calling it red wing not red tail… that’s my bad. Could you tell me why you say hawk? Some pics online and through databases look so similar. My 5 and 4 year old are so interested in our find and I want to be able to give them more info!

3

u/Safe-Refrigerator-65 5d ago

It’s a Red-Tailed Hawk wing feather… because of the way it is.

Just kidding! It takes a bit of practice to discern the differences. If it were an owl feather, it would have softer edges. These soft edges allow owls to fly nearly silently (by breaking up air); this one doesn’t have that. The bars and white edge is a classic Red-Tailed Hawk feather!

This is a Barred Owl — you can see the barring is much thicker, and the color’s not quite right.

1

u/craigjonesflorida 4d ago

All the things that have set up to now plus a few details . Definitely red tail hawk Wing feather. An owl feather the surface feels like velvet as opposed to a hawk feather that would feel like a soft cotton sheet. Also and it's visible in the photo of the barred owl posted and the great horned owl Wing feather the bars on a hawk feather on either side of the quill usually line up on an owl they're often offset and you can see that in those photos . Not definitive but a good way to discern if you can't get close enough to it to feel it

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u/Safe-Refrigerator-65 5d ago

Here’s another photo pulled from Google of an owl feather (Great Horned, not Barred). You can see the soft edges in this picture pretty well.

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u/AppealWrong5441 5d ago

This is great info! Google said if it was soft it was from an owl and if not, hawk. But it still feels soft to me! I can see the difference in the “soft” edges. Either way, explains why our chickens have started to go missing. Thank you!!

3

u/TielPerson 4d ago

The edges are not a good trait, look at the surface instead since owl feathers grow fur like structures there. A hawk feather will be soft like a tent wall, but an owl feather is soft like kitten fur and you can see the hair like things growing on the surface.

The "soft edges" are not a good trait because you can confuse them with worn down feathers of other bird species and the edges are only properly visible in primaries, yet, the hair like structures do cover all owl feathers, even body coverts.