Birdman

compared to hawks, falcons have shorter and weaker talons and shorter beaks! this, combined with a lighter overall build, means that falconkind is really badly unsuited to do the hawk/eagle/owl thing where they just plunge out of the sky and stab a rabbit to death with their feet.

so what they do instead is fly really high in the air, keeping an eye out for unwary birds they could get the drop on, and then they DROP. and as they drop, they curl their talon into a fist, which they use to strike their unwary prey at speeds well in excess of a hundred miles per hour. (this either stuns or outright kills the unlucky target) 

and this method works so well that they can even take down birds much larger than themselves, like ducks!

so basically,

FALCON

Hawks, like eagles and buzzards and vultures, are all accipiters (order: accipitriformes). Basically this includes MOST of the non-nocturnal birds of prey.

It does not include falcons and kestrels (order: falconiformes).

However, thanks to the whole convergent evolution thing (= if you want to do the same job you end up evolving similar strategies) a lot of hawks look very like falcons. Similarly, thylacines look(ed) like dogs - even though thylacines are marsupials, and so they’re more closely related to the bilby than to dogs, and dogs are more closely related to whales than to thylacines!

So you end up with a hawk…

… looking very like a falcon….

… even though literally the only thing they have in common, in terms of ancestry, is that they are both birds.

Falcons are actually far more closely related to passerine birds (perching birds like sparrows and corvids) than they are to hawks and owls.

But you know who they’re just as closely related to (and, let’s face it, who they most closely resemble)?

These bastards.