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When I was young, we used to feed the birds in our back yard and in the winter we would get a large variety of birds and some of them were really pretty special. There used to be flocks of up a hundred Evening Grosbeaks, about the same number of Common Redpolls as well as a few Hoary Redpolls and Pine Grosbeaks. I was always mesmerized by the flocks at the feeders but my brothers really never took any real notice. One morning in the winter when my youngest brother was only about six years old, he came running into the house all out of breath, shoved his hand into a fifty pound bag of sunflower seeds, took a big handful and bolted out the door. He had never showed any interest in the beautiful birds at the feeders before, so what was the big rush for?
I went outside to find my brother holding the handful of sunflower seeds up towards a Cooper’s Hawk which had a House Sparrow in its talons. The hawk must have already been pretty full because it didn’t even move when he put his hand up to within a foot of the hawks talons. It was kind of amusing to see and I had to explain to him that hawks weren’t seed eaters and he was feeding on the sparrow in his talons. But......he was finally impressed by a bird and that made me feel great. Generally speaking, people seem to take more notice of large birds than passerines. And my brother had picked a good one to catch his eye.
Cooper’s Hawks are a member of the family of hawks that are known as accipiters, those hawks with short rounded wings and long tails. Quick flying, they are sometimes referred to as bird hawks for their habit of feeding on small birds and they are the family of hawks that are most often seen coming into bird feeders, which is of course where the food source is at.
Similar to the smaller Sharp-shinned Hawk, the Cooper’s Hawk is around 20 inches long. It has a blue-gray color over the back with the top of the head a blackish color. The breast and belly is a white color with reddish barring. Its tail is long with rounded tips. The eyes are yellow to red. While they are outwardly the same in color, the female is usually a little larger than the male.
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