Ayres's Hawk-Eagle

The adult male has blackish upper parts that are mottled with white and usually has a white forehead and supercilium. The upper-wing coverts are similar. The tail is ashy grey with a broad black tip and three to four narrower dark bars. Primary feathers and secondary feathers are black. The underparts are white, with heavy dark brown spots and blotches on the breast and belly, becoming sparser on the thighs and vent. The legs are well-feathered and pure white. The under-wing coverts are brown and marked with white, and the underside of flight feathers is dark and heavily barred lacking any noticeable grey patch. The eyes are yellow to orange, the cere and feet yellow, and the bill is bluish horn coloured becoming paler towards the base, with a black tip. This species has a small but at times pronounced crest. The males are smaller than the females, darker and usually more densely spotted on the underparts, and have a smaller amount of white on the forehead and supercilium. There are two phases, the normal as described above and a melanistic phase, which is mostly black with white markings. The juvenile Ayres's hawk-eagle is dark brown on the back and coverts, similarly dark on the crown, slightly paler necked, largely white below from the throat to the crissum and legs with sparse dark brown markings variably along the chest, belly, and flanks. …

Ayres's hawk-eagle has a patchy sub-Saharan distribution ranging from Sierra Leone east to Somalia, and south to northern Namibia and northeast South Africa. Its central range is from the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo and southern Uganda down almost throughout Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique as well as much of Angola to northeastern Namibia, northern Botswana and northern Zimbabwe. In the rainy season moves out of denser and taller deciduous woodlands of central Africa into more open albeit treed savanna habitat further south, and probably into coastal East Africa; as the rains cause the leaves to emerge turning woodland into forests and tree savanna into woodland. It may then enter towns in South Africa to prey mainly on doves and feral pigeons. A similar north to south movement is expected in west Africa, where species has been recorded as a vagrant west to Senegal and Gambia, albeit unconfirmed. It tends to occur around woodlands of Brachystegia and Baikiaea in the core south-central African part of their distribution. It is not typically a forest dwelling species and prefers mature woodland among often irregular, rocky terrain. Occasionally but not regularly they may habituate to Acacia plantations and riparian zones. Ayres's hawk-eagles tend to be rare in hyper arid and, of course, treeless areas.