A Cooper’s Hawk at Dusk
On another March day, earlier this week, by the time I got outside it was late, and the sun was low and almost hidden by yellow-gray clouds moving in from the west. Rain was expected for later that night and all the next day. The air felt warm and restless.
Around the feeders in our front yard were a pair of Pine Warblers, a pair of Downy Woodpeckers, a pair of Northern Cardinals, and two Carolina Chickadees that may or may not have been a male and female, but looked as if they were together. A gathering of couples. Several Chipping Sparrows also crowded the feeders, one White-throated Sparrow and a few Dark-eyed Juncos hunted on the ground, and dozens of American Robins were scattered all over the yard, in the grass and shrubs and trees. A Pine Warbler sang.
It had been a busy day, and my mind was often distracted as I walked, but now and then something called me back to the present. A Red-shouldered Hawk cried kee-yer repeatedly from somewhere beyond the woods toward the north, hidden by the trees.
The ti-ti-ti calls of two Golden-crowned Kinglets flitted around in the bare limbs of oaks and tulip poplars along one stretch of road where I almost always hear them recently. They were high in the trees, but I caught a glimpse of a black and white striped face, and a tiny flash of yellow crown. A Yellow-bellied Sapsucker mewed as it flew into a pecan tree nearby, at the top of a hill, and a break in the clouds let the sun come out, so the Sapsucker’s throat glowed like a ruby.
Just outside our neighborhood, through the noise of evening traffic on the highway below the old field, I could barely hear the calls of Eastern Towhees and the tseets of a few White-throated Sparrows, but not much else. Across the road from the field, I stopped at a corner to pay my respects at the spot where a large, almost black, thick-trunked oak had stood for many years. One of several large oaks – whose history I wish I knew – still standing in a neglected stretch of undeveloped land on the fringes of two subdivisions, this one had grown closest to the road. It looked like a tough, embattled old tree, with a sprawling, irregular cavity in its trunk and many other scars. Its largest limbs had already been cut back severely, so they looked like awkward stumps. It may have been diseased and dying, though last summer it still had leaves, and a Blue Grosbeak often perched in its branches to sing. I had recently noticed a red ribbon tied around its trunk, so I hadn’t been surprised to see a tree service truck and crew that morning, cutting it down. The only sign left of the old tree now was a soft, loose brown covering of wood chips where it used to grow.
I turned back toward home, and only a few steps down the road heard the rasping calls and one myeeur of a Gray Catbird – in almost exactly the same area of thicket and weeds where I saw one in late February, so maybe it’s the same. It hopped up into view – a long and slender bird, slate gray with a slim black cap – then flew further up to a low branch in another big old oak and perched there with its tail held high.
The sun went down, and clouds covered the sky, bringing an early twilight. When I got to the top of the last hill before turning back onto the road that leads to our house, I stopped and looked back down the hill. A smoke-gray shadow of a bird in the fading light, with spread wings and a long narrow tail, glided smoothly and fast, straight down over the road, and disappeared into the dense dark depths of a very big magnolia tree that stands in the middle of a large grass yard, as featureless and well-kept as a golf course.
Though I couldn’t see it well, I’m fairly sure it was a Cooper’s Hawk. Over the past few winters I’ve seen one slip into this tree at twilight several times. Disappearing like magic – like a falling star in the night – you’d never know it was there. Though the yard around it is open, the tree itself is thick with overlapping leaves, and across the road are many trees and shrubs, and woods beyond.