A coworker was talking about football teams and got us all wondering if there’s such a thing as a seahawk. A net search revealed nothing but links to sports teams and helicopters, while ornithology and Audubon pages revealed nothing at all.
If I had to guess (and I don’t suppose I do, but I will anyway,) seahawk would be another word for an osprey. Ospreys are indeed of the hawk family, and they live near the sea, and are accomplished fishers—if I can believe what I’ve seen on the back of Canadian currency. dictionary.com reveals nothing.
Does anyone have any idea what a seahawk is—or, at least, what it was?
MY Mathews, Dictionary of Americanisms usually has flora/fauna words from the last three centuries. If it was at all a phrase in use in US in the last two centuries, it would be there. It wasn’t.
Sounds like Seattle just made it up for their team.
From Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged:
sea hawk: JAEGER, SKUA
The jaeger being “any of several large and spirited rapacious birds of prey of the family Stercorariidae (as Stercorarius parasiticus that inhabit the northern seas, are usu. blackish brown above and lighter below or chiefly sooty brown or blackish with the bill hooked and cered, are strong flyers, and harass weaker birds until they drop or disgorge their prey”, and skua being yet another name for certain jaegers. So, no, it’s not like they made up the name completely, like “sea gerbil” or something, although running it together as one word apparently represents mildly unorthodox orthography.
As usual, it’s hard to answer a question first around here. I’ll just add to MEBuckner’s correct explanation. The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds lists four species of the Skua family, three of which are called jaegers and the other is just called a skua. It lists other names for the skua (Catharacta skua) as bonxie, great skua, sea hawk, sea hen, and skua gull.
Skuas and jaegers are actually similar to gulls, not hawks. However, they are the predators of the oceans as hawks are the preditors of the land and they have a have a “hawk-like fleshy cere across [the] base of the the upper mandible”.
Interstingly, “jaeger” is a German word meaning hunter, and was used originally for plunderers and robbers along the Rhine River. In other words, jaegers were raiders.