Buteo lineatus
The red-shouldered hawk is a medium-sized buteo. Its breeding range spans eastern North America, along the coast of California and northern to northeastern-central Mexico. It is a permanent resident throughout most of its range, though northern birds do migrate, mostly to central Mexico. The main conservation threat to the widespread species is deforestation.

Andy Morffew from Itchen Abbas, Hampshire, UK · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Also called
- red-shouldered hawkPBDB
- Sits inside
- ButeoPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Accipitridae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Accipitridae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Theropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Accipitridae
- Mass
- 550 gWikidata
Time the record covers
At least 198 thousand years on record.
The record covers at least 210 ka to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 2.58 Mya to 0 Mya.
15 occurrences of Buteo lineatus on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
15 occurrences- Pleistocene73%
- Holocene27%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
2 formations
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Buteo lineatus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 13 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Buteo lineatus and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Buteo lineatus and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
529 taxa- Corvus brachyrhynchos9 sites
- Buteo jamaicensis8 sites
- Haliaeetus leucocephalus7 sites
- Meleagris gallopavo7 sites
- Tyto alba7 sites
- Colinus virginianus6 sites
- Dasypus bellus6 sites
- Equus6 sites
- Odocoileus virginianus6 sites
- Phalacrocorax auritus6 sites
- Procyon lotor6 sites
- Sciurus carolinensis6 sites
- Strix varia6 sites
- Anas5 sites
- Antigone canadensis5 sites
- Lynx rufus5 sites
- Mammut americanum5 sites
- Palaeolama mirifica5 sites
- Paramylodon harlani5 sites
- Scalopus aquaticus5 sites
- Urocyon cinereoargenteus5 sites
- Ursus americanus5 sites
- Accipiter cooperii4 sites
- Aenocyon dirus4 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 14 sites for Buteo lineatus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
11 references- Prehistoric human impacts on California birds: evidence from the Emeryville shellmoumd avifauna3
- Avian community, climate, and sea-level changes in the Plio-Pleistocene of the Florida Peninsula2
- The avifauna of the Pleistocene in Florida2
- The fossil avifauna of the tar seeps Las Breas de San Felipe, Matanzas, Cuba1
- A middle Pleistocene bird community from Saint Lucie County, Florida1
- Fossil red-shouldered hawk in the Bahamas: Calohierax quadratus Wetmore synonymized with Buteo lineatus (Gmelin)1
- Taphonomy of a late Pleistocene carnivore den, Dade County, Florida1
- The Pleistocene vertebrate fauna of Reddick, Florida1
- Notes on fossil and subfossil birds1
- Animal remains from Ohio rock shelters1
- The fossil Birds of California1
Each of the 15 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Buteo lineatus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Andy Morffew from Itchen Abbas, Hampshire, UK
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Buteo lineatus was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itButeo through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Gmelin 1788)