A blur flashed outside one of our second-floor windows on Friday and suddenly stopped less than 100 feet from me at about my eye level. It resolved itself into this handsome devil on the hunt.
He’s a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk who scanned the area for a few minutes, spotted something below, and swooped down, returning to a blur. (Sex assumed.)
Cooper’s Hawks are recovering well from devastating losses in the first half of the last century, when many were shot on sight. You know why they were slaughtered if you know that their other most common name is “chicken hawk.” There are reports in Edward Howe Forbush’s treatise of these birds swooping down with blinding speed and plucking a chicken as the very nearby farmer watched in frustration. (The bird was named officially in 1828 in honor of the ornithologist William Cooper; its scientific name is Accipiter cooperii.)
To be sure, Cooper’s are extraordinarily efficient predators, but they take far fewer chickens than they do small- to medium-sized wild birds and such occasional prey as small mammals and snakes. Their hunting prowess is legendary and the subject of one of Forbush’s most dramatic descriptions:
“When the ‘Cooper’s’ loud ‘cucks’ ring through the sunny, leafy woods …, the hush of death pervades everything. All erstwhile cheerful thrushes and warblers become still and silent. The ‘Cooper’s’ fierce ‘cucks’ are the most merciless sounds of our summer woods. There is indeed death in the air.” Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, II (1927). (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 7, 2023.)