Female Sparrowhawk: Male vs Female and Young Birds

Male and female Sparrowhawks differ in colour and, even more, in size. This page covers how to tell them apart, the young birds that confuse things, their sizes and weights, and how the sexes split the work of hunting and raising a family. For the species as a whole, see the Sparrowhawk guide.

Look at the back and the breast. An adult male is blue-grey above, with rufous cheeks and orangey-brown bars below; a female is grey-brown above, with dark-brown bars below and a pale stripe over the eye.^{1, 2} Size helps when you see two together: in the breeding season the female is about double the male's weight.³

A larger, grey-brown hawk with a long tail: grey-brown or brownish-slate above, whitish below with grey-brown or dark-brown bars, a fairly obvious pale stripe over a bright yellow to orange eye, and long, thin yellow legs. Some females are big enough to be mistaken for a Goshawk,¹ which is bigger and stockier still, with a bolder white eyebrow and thicker legs.⁴ More on telling a Goshawk from a Sparrowhawk.

Smaller and more colourful: slate or blue-grey above, with rufous cheeks, orangey-brown bars on a whitish breast, and little or no pale eyebrow. An adult male's eyes are yellow-orange to orange-red or even scarlet.¹ Falconers called the male a musket, from its colour or its small size,⁵ the same word as the old gun.⁶

In their first year young birds of both sexes look like browner females: brown above with rusty edges to the feathers, and broader bars below. Their eyes are pale yellow to yellow.¹ They are a little lighter than adults of their sex.⁷

Young birds are also the ones you are most likely to hear. After leaving the nest they are fed for another three to four weeks, and they beg with thin, drawn-out notes.¹ Hear them, and an adult's call, on our Sparrowhawk call page.

Weighed by ringers, live British males average 151 g and females 266 g.⁸ Weights change through the year. In a study in Dumfriesshire, adult males averaged 143 g in August and 155 g in March, while adult females averaged 258-262 g in late summer and 325 g at egg-laying in May, after putting on 40-50 g in the 10-20 days before laying. In the same study, males' wings measured 188-211 mm and females' 222-251 mm, with no overlap at all.⁷

The size gap shows in the prey. Males hunt more in dense woodland and take smaller birds on average; females hunt more in the open and take larger birds, occasionally up to pigeons.¹ At three nests in south-west Scotland, males brought prey up to about 80 g and females up to about 500 g.⁹

The male feeds the family. In Newton's long study in southern Scotland he did nearly all the hunting from before the eggs were laid until the chicks were about half grown, while the female incubated and brooded; after that she hunted too.³ At a nest filmed in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, the male's deliveries fell and the female's rose as the chicks grew, but the male still made the most deliveries, and late on the female brought larger prey;¹⁰ at three forest nests in south-west Scotland, both parents brought about the same number of items late on.⁹

The chicks differ too: female chicks grow almost twice as heavy as their brothers before they leave the nest, and the males fly about four days earlier.⁹

Not by much, if at all. Ringing gives almost the same yearly survival for adult females (68%) and males (67%).⁸ More females than males turn up dead: of 341 birds sent in for examination in 1963-79, 193 were females and 137 males, which the researchers linked to females spending more time around farmland and villages.¹¹

1. Meyburg, B.-U., Marks, J. S., Garcia, E., Perlman, Y. (2025). Eurasian Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus), version 1.1. Birds of the World (J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, J. Sargatal, D. A. Christie, E. de Juana and M. G. Smith, editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology. doi:10.2173/bow.eurspa1.01.1
2. RSPB. Sparrowhawk. RSPB Birds A-Z. Accessed 27 October 2026. Source
3. Newton, I. (2008). Highlights from a long-term study of Sparrowhawks. British Birds 101: 607-623. Accessed 27 October 2026. Source
4. RSPB. Goshawk. RSPB Birds A-Z. Accessed 27 October 2026. Source
5. Swainson, C. (1885). The Provincial Names and Folk Lore of British Birds. English Dialect Society / Trübner, London. Accessed 27 October 2026. Source
6. Porter, N. (editor) (1913). Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. C. & G. Merriam Co. (as printed in the Gutenberg front matter); Project Gutenberg eBook 665. Accessed 27 October 2026. Source
7. Newton, I., Marquiss, M., Village, A. (1983). Weights, breeding, and survival in European Sparrowhawks. The Auk 100: 344-354. doi:10.1093/auk/100.2.344
8. BTO. Sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus). BTO BirdFacts. Accessed 27 October 2026. Source
9. Newton, I. (1978). Feeding and development of Sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus nestlings. Journal of Zoology 184: 465-487. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7998.1978.tb03302.x
10. Watts, S. H. (2014). A study of nesting sparrowhawks Accipiter nisus using video analysis. Bird Study 61: 428-437. doi:10.1080/00063657.2014.940838
11. Newton, I., Bell, A. A., Wyllie, I. (1982). Mortality of Sparrowhawks and Kestrels. British Birds 75: 195-204. Accessed 27 October 2026. Source