An immature sharp-shinned hawk (or possibly an immature Cooper’s hawk; the bird references I’ve used, Petersen and Sibley, say they’re sometimes impossible to tell apart) in front of the neighbor’s house this morning. These hawks hunt other birds, but this one might have been angling for a squirrel meal; when we (the dog and I) surprised the bird, which was on the neighbor’s front fence, a squirrel scurried away from the same area.
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That is quite a find, Dan. I think that is a Cooper’s, because, even if it is immature, it seems too large to be a sharp-shinned.
R.I. Brasher writes in 1917 in “Birds of America,” (paraphrasing) that the Cooper is the most destructive of all the hawks they have to contend with on their farm in Kent, Conn. But, not because it is individually worse than the Goshawk, but because there are just so damn many. Of course, that was back then.