Cooper’s Hawk
Accipiter cooperii

Compiled by Lisa S. Graham

Have all the birds mysteriously abandoned your backyard feeder?  It may mean there’s Cooper’s Hawk in the vicinity.  These skilled fliers see backyard feeders as a good place for an easy lunch.  Although you may miss your colorful songbirds while the Cooper’s is around, they do bring their own form of fierce beauty.  If they wear out their welcome, take down your feeder for a few days, and they will move on to greener pastures.

The Cooper’s Hawk lives in Texas year-round, so they can haunt your feeder in all seasons.  Many birders have difficulty telling the Cooper’s Hawk from the Sharp-shinned Hawk.  A couple of things to look at:  size and coloring of the head and shape of the tail.  A Cooper’s Hawk has a sizable noggin – it’s like a cube stacked right on its shoulders; and on the nape of their neck, the Cooper’s have lighter feathers, like they’re wearing a cap.  The Sharp-shinned has a much more proportionate head, and their nape is the same dark color as the rest of their head.  The other field mark that can help is the shape of their tails – the Coopers is generally rounded while the Sharp-shinned is flat.

As is often the case with hawks, the female is the larger of the pair and is also the most dominant.  Males have to be cautious during mating season and will listen for a specific call from the female before approaching her.  He’s also the one who builds the nest and brings the food to the female and young.  Nests are made of sticks, are roughly two feet wide, and up to a foot and a half deep – the egg cup is lined with flakes of bark.  The pair will raise one brood per year consisting of 2 to 6 eggs.  The eggs incubate for a little more than 30 days and nestlings will fledge after 27 to 34 days.

Cooper’s Hawks dine mostly on birds, generally the more medium-sized – European Starlings, Mourning Doves, Rock Pigeons, American Robins, and various types of jays.  They will also eat mammals like squirrels, hares, mice, and bats.  The mammal diet is more common in the western US.

They are very agile fliers – darting among branches in pursuit of prey.  They are also quite stealthy, hiding in dense cover then putting on a burst of speed.  This is a dangerous way to hunt; in a study of Cooper’s Hawks skeletons, scientists discovered that 23% of them had healed fractures to the bones of their chest – from collisions with branches.  Cooper’s kill their prey by repeated squeezing – they hold the prey away from their bodies until it dies.  There are also documented cases of Cooper’s Hawk drowning their prey, holding a bird underwater until it stops moving.

If a Cooper’s Hawk honors your feeder with a visit, know that you have a good variety of birds taking advantage of the food you’re providing.  They will visit feeders in the suburbs as well as hunting in parks and woodlands.  Keep an eye out for this magnificent predator and remember – noggin size is key to identification.

Sources include All About Birds (Cornell) and Audubon Field Guide.

Photo credit:  Brenden Klick, Macaulay Library