The Great Black Hawk is a large raptor with a dark adult body and distinctive white markings on the tail. In Peru, it is recorded along lowland Amazonian rivers and in forests in the northwest.
Adults are dark, with gray barring on the flight feathers and white on the rump and base of the tail. Juveniles are mottled with brown and gray.
In the Peruvian Amazon it is associated with riverine lowlands; in northwestern Peru it has also been recorded in semi-deciduous forest.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.