These photos were taken on the deck in my back yard in East Lansing, just after sunrise, on 05-12-2020. According to the Audubon.org website, the best match I could find was that of an adult Broad-wing hawk. Needless to say, the other birds and squirrels quickly scattered. If you think I have misidentified the species, then please let me know what it is. Thanks! Jim
Great pictures! It looks like a mature Cooper's Hawk. They can be hard to ID because they can look different as they get older. The younger birds have more brown on their back with a cream chest with strong brown streaking on a cream chest. The older birds have steely blue-gray above with warm reddish bars on their underparts and thick dark bands on the tail.
Seeing a hawk at the feeder is a good sign. Unlike other birds, hawks reproduce very slowly and we are only now seeing many raptor populations recover from the massive deaths that occurred in the early 1900s from hunting and the 1960s from DDT. And other human-caused problems such as loss of nesting habitat, highway vehicles and electrical wires continue to impact the population of certain raptor species in many areas.
Ultimately, the only thing you can do when a hawk comes to dinner is wait it out. Most hawks that settle in at feeders do so for a couple days or weeks and then they are off again to different territory.
Cooper's Hawks are a medium sized hawk with short wings (2.5 foot wingspan) and 15-20 inches from tip to tail. They are predators primarily of birds and small mammals. When hunting, Cooper's hawks usually perch in a hidden location during the day and watch for prey. They wait until their prey is unaware of their presence, then quickly swoop down and seize it.
Mourning Doves
,
starlings
,
chipmunks
, and
squirrels
are common prey for Cooper's hawks.
The Cooper’s Hawk was first described in 1828 by Charles Bonaparte, a French naturalist and ornithologist who was the nephew of Napoleon. It was named after William Cooper, who collected the first specimen. A group of hawks is called a "boil", "knot", "spiraling", "stream", and "tower" of hawks.
Thank you for sharing! If anyone else would like to share a photograph of nature send it to
bloubird@gmail.com
with permission to share.
