Posted by:
Wyvern
at Tue Mar 31 11:40:54 2009 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Wyvern ]
>>I'm fairly certain what we have here is a Cooper's Hawk. Sharpie's have much smaller heads compared to the shoulders. A male Coopers is just about the same size as a big female Sharpie.
>>Paul
I took into account for the possibility of it being a Cooper's Hawk, but ultimately rejected the idea.
I know that a male cooper can be of similar size to a female sharpie and I know that both birds have similar color phases to one another.
When you look at the first picture -- it is the best shot of the bird in a natural profile pose compared to the other two photos with the head turned off kilter. My leanings toward it being a sharpie was this:
The legs are thin and yellow color is dull. Coopers have thicker and more noticeably bright yellow chicken legs.
The head is more rounded and short where a cooper's would be a bit flatter and longer.
The beak is short/tucked in looking - not sticking further out like a cooper's.
The tail feathers appear more squared off instead of rounded (a little hard to see because they are splayed out a bit).
The tail feathers are lacking the noticeable white terminal band you would see in a cooper's. The terminal band you see in the photo is dark gray which is what you normally see in a sharpie (occasionally sharpies can have a very thin white tipping below the gray terminal band, but even that is not showing in the photo).
The acrobatic behavior of the bird having flown through a window screen at high speed while chasing a songbird does not match the normal flight behavior of a cooper's, but does match the behavior of a sharpie.
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RE: That is probably a Cooper's Hawk - Wyvern, Tue Mar 31 11:40:54 2009