Cooper's Hawks

Me and a Coopers Hawk, some time back in the Pleistocene (late 1980s, I think)

The first Cooper’s Hawk I met was at a raptor rehabilitation center in Vermont. The bird was a small male who had broken his wing a year  previously and could not fly, and so was not releasable. He was very nervous and hard to manage. He would flutter frantically into the walls and windows of his pen whenever anyone approached. The rehabilitator asked me to work with the bird, to see if the bird could be convinced to calm down.

He did eventually become tame enough to fly to the fist and stand, which made handling him far less traumatic for everyone concerned. The Coops was never calm enough to be a good teaching bird, though, which was the ultimate goal. He was too twitchy to be near crowds of people. He was very reactive, and would explode away into a flurry of feathers and wing-beats when he even thought that something surprising might happen, or if he saw something that might be good to eat. There was almost no gap between perception and action for him. He lived much faster than people do.

This was the first time I’d been near a creature like this, and the first time I’d ever tried anything remotely like falconry. Both fascinated me.

An Arizona Coops

Coops are a strange mixture of tame and wild. They will be skittish and spooky one moment, sparking away in a flurry when they see you. Then, when they are hunting, they can be as murderously single-minded as Freddy Kruger pursuing a horror movie starlet.

The monster-movie analogy is a good one other ways. Like a ghost in a story, you can often sense when they are nearby, but not see them. You may catch a glimpse of them out of the corner of your eye, a flicker of movement. You wonder if you are imagining things. And then, there they are. Then the world seems to focus to a point on them, as they glare back at you with their blood red eyes.

They carry a bubble around them as they move through the world, a bubble comprised of their effects on other creatures.

When Coops are on the hunt the birds and squirrels fall silent, and hide or fly away. You’ll look up, wondering what’s going on, why it’s so quiet. And the Coops will appear. When the Coops leaves, life resumes, and the other birds carry on.

Cooper’s Hawk on the hunt, hiding in an olive tree

Squirrel frozen in tree, about 10 feet above Cooper’s Hawk in the previous photo. Motionless, mouth full of Russian olives, eyes tightly shut - repeating a silent mantra of “This is not happening, this is not happening…”

When the Coops are not actively hunting, on the other hand, you can often find them by the screeching and chittering of songbirds as they mob the hawk, trying to get the Coops to leave. Think “villagers with torches.” The other birds don’t like to have Coopers Hawks around. Intimations of mortality.

We see Cooper’s Hawks frequently around the house. One year, when we had a lot of half grown chickens, we were losing a chicken a day to a marauding Cooper’s Hawk. I’d hear the chickens frantically panic-calling and I would run out, waving my arms and yelling to scare the hawk off. That sort-of worked, assuming she’d missed on her initial attack. Unfortunately, she usually didn’t miss her initial attack. Then I would watch as she flew off with a young chicken swinging from her talons.

I thought a better approach would be to put netting over the top of the chicken enclosure, so the hawk couldn’t get to the birds at all. I got some plastic netting designed to keep blackbirds away from raspberry bushes and strung that over the enclosure. There, I thought. That’ll do the trick…no way she’ll get them now.

A day later I heard the chickens calling in a panic. When I went out, I saw the Cooper’s Hawk dive at the chickens and hit the net. She bounced off of the net and was thrown back into the air, like a circus acrobat, only to dive again, and again.

She finally landed on the net. Then she began bouncing, up and down. As the net went down, she reached through the net with her talons towards the chickens. It was like she was on a trampoline, bouncing up and down with her legs through the netting, stretching and clutching for the chickens, getting a little closer to the chickens with each bounce.

I chased her away and didn’t see her come back again after that. But her tenacity and ingenuity astonished me.

Adult male Cooper’s Hawk in a Cottonwood tree

There is a falconry term - ‘in yarak’ - that was developed for Accipiters. I think the term comes from Persian. It’s a state where the bird becomes fixated on its prey to the exclusion of all else, almost frantically chasing its prey. It is related to hunger in the bird, in that a hungry bird is more likely to enter yarak. But hunger is not solely the cause of it. I’m thinking that ‘yarak’ tendency is why they seem so skittish one moment and committed the next.

It’s my understanding that ‘yarak’ is also vulgar Turkish slang for ‘penis’, but that is another subject entirely. Or at least I think it is.

In any case, it is perhaps not a term to use in the company of polite Turks.

Cooper’s Hawk screaming at a Great Horned Owl. Cooper’s Hawks think of owls the way other birds think of Cooper’s Hawks.