Picture here - found it eating a squirrel on my front lawn when leaving for work the other day. It tried to fly off with the carcass when I pulled my car out of the garage but wasn’t strong enough to lift off with it, apparently. So it just sat there and waited for me to leave.
My wife thinks it’s an osprey but it nests in a tree in the back yard and there’s no major body of water nearby (just some ornamental lakes). I think it’s a red-shouldered hawk after comparing it to the pictures on that page (particularly the fourth one).
We’re in Florida, but in Orlando so nowhere near the sea.
I’ve definitely seen red-tailed hawks go after squirrels, particularly in suburban areas with the open grassy areas where they like to hunt, and where the squirrels have grown fat and careless. (See the picture at the top of All About Bird’s entry for the red-tailed hawk, for example.) In a more “natural” setting, hunting in an open grassland, red-tailed hawks probably wouldn’t catch a tree squirrel all that often.
Red-shouldered hawks, on the other hand, “naturally” tend to hunt in forests, and would be more likely to catch a squirrel.
