Bird Watch: Hawk on the Hunt

A few days ago, we were sitting by the windows overlooking our back yard, enjoying our lunch, when a bird almost the size of a Crow raced past just above our eye level. We put down our sandwiches, grabbed binoculars, and hurried to another window hoping we might find it perched somewhere. It must have seen us, though, because even before we could raise the binoculars it took off, flew toward the woods across the road, and was gone. We had only a brief look at the bird, but we were fairly sure it was a Hawk, and based on past experiences we guessed it might have been a Cooper’s Hawk.

The Cooper’s Hawk is an accipiter, which the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America describes as an agile woodland Hawk with comparatively long tail and short rounded wings. Three accipiters breed in Maine: Sharp-shinned Hawk, Cooper’s Hawk, and Northern Goshawk. The largest, Northern Goshawk, is larger than a Crow and can take prey as large as Ruffed Grouse or snowshoe hare. Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks are very similar in appearance, but the smaller Sharp-shinned is about the size of a Blue Jay and typically flies with several quick flaps followed by a short glide, described as flap-flap-sail. Cooper’s Hawk is about fourteen to twenty inches long, from the tip of the bill to the end of the tail, with a wingspan of twenty-nine to thirty-seven inches. A sort of parabolic-reflecting feather pattern on the face, like an Owl’s face, may serve to focus the distress calls of birds or mammals. As with other Hawks, females are larger than males, so there can be some overlap in size between a male Cooper’s and a female Sharp-shinned. There are differences in the plumage of both species, such as shape of the end of the tail, coloring of the head, and a few other details, but in general their plumage is quite similar.