Habitat use by breeding male Northern Goshawks in northern Arizona

• Main Author: Bright-Smith, Donald Joseph
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: The University of Arizona. 1994
• Subjects: Agriculture; Forestry and Wildlife; Accipiter gentilis
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/278435

I radio-tagged and followed 5 and 9 male Northern Goshawks (Accipiter gentilis atricapillus) during the breeding seasons of 1991 and 1992, respectively, to evaluate their use of different forest conditions in managed ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) forests. Sufficient data for habitat analyses were collected for 11 birds. Minimum convex polygon home-ranges averaged 1,758 ha (SD = 500 ha, range 896-2528 ha) and harmonic mean home ranges averaged 1,530 ha (SD = 477 ha, range 859-2,321 ha). I compared use (i.e., number of hawk locations) and availability (i.e., % of area of home range) for three different forest conditions (canopy closure, edge, and diversity) generated from LANDSAT data. Most (≥6) of the 11 birds used the categories in the three overlays in proportion to their availability. Six of the 11 birds used at least one category on one of the overlays nonrandomly. When the categories of canopy closure were ranked for each bird on the basis of relative preference, these ranks increased with increasing canopy closure.