Cooper’s Hawk
Very late this afternoon I walked through the neighborhood under a china blue sky crowded with clouds of many shapes and shades, the aftermath of heavy storms the night before – graceful white wisps of cirrus clouds, rafts of small, high, cottony puffs, streams of long somber gray, a few low, filmy dusky-peach clouds like pastel smoke, and a line of gilded and curled cloud castles low in the southwest. The sun was still well above the horizon but sinking fast, and as it did, the clouds all blushed and glowed and faded in different ways in a quiet, flowing play of light. The fleeting, everyday miracles of sunset.
The air felt cold and breezy, and for most of the way birds were even more quiet than usual at this hour, with just a few calls here and there. The song of a Carolina Wren. The soft clucks of a passing flock of Blackbirds. The chatter of a Carolina Chickadee. The blurry warble of an Eastern Bluebird. The rich chur-whee of an Eastern Towhee. The peeps of Northern Cardinals.
As I walked up a gradual hill near a pond, mostly watching the show in the sky, a scattering of American Robins clucked and chuckled here and there, moving from grass to trees and shrubs. Suddenly a small, sleek hawk the color of a storm cloud burst out of trees on one side of the road, and swooped fast and low across the road only a short way ahead of me, so close it seemed impossible. It crossed a yard and flew like a missile into a large magnolia tree – and a burst of smaller birds came out of the tree like a small explosion. I think there were only three or four birds that flew out – but it looked like more because the impact of the hawk had been so dramatic. The hawk itself also came back out of the tree very quickly, almost as if it had bounced. It flew up, over the magnolia, and stopped on a high branch of a nearby bare-limbed pecan tree, where it sat. I could only imagine it shaking its head and maybe smoothing its ruffled feathers.
Wow. I did not have binoculars with me, so could not see it well, but I was pretty sure of what it was, and when I heard a bright kek call once, and again – I was even more certain. A Cooper’s Hawk. A medium-size raptor with a blue-gray back and dense reddish barring on the breast, and a long tail. It specializes in hunting smaller birds. Cooper’s Hawks don’t use the kek call often, so I was a little surprised to hear this, but it was very clear and repeated three separate times, all soon after it had settled in the bare-limbed tree.
This one stayed sitting in the tree for several minutes more, but all I could see of it was a dark silhouette against a pale, fading sky. It seemed to be sitting pretty still, but it might have been holding a small bird in its talons. When I finally walked on toward home, it was still there.