There’s a bird hawk in my neighborhood. It keeps an eye on the feeders. It keeps an eye on me. When I look at it, it takes off and flies low through the trees without hitting anything. From its viewpoint, the terrain must look like something out of a Star Wars space battle. The bird hawk zooms over, under and around branches with no problem.
The problem belongs to the other birds. They’re food on the wing for the bird hawk. It’ll take them out of the air as they fly. Or it’ll come up behind them as they sit near a feeder. And they’ll be gone without a peep.
It’s a bird-eat-bird world, and the bird hawk doesn’t care about much else. It certainly doesn’t care about what we call it, taxonomically speaking. Yeah, you’ve probably been wondering why a two-fisted bird watcher has been using a vague term like “bird hawk.” Well, it’s a good term. Descriptive and fail safe.
See, this is probably a Sharp-Shinned Hawk. How it got that name is another avian-naming curiosity. It doesn’t sit still long enough for you look at its shins, and who knows what sharp ones would look like anyway? But it might be a Cooper’s Hawk.
You knew that, right? It’s one or the other. Sharp-Shinned or Cooper’s. I’m not sure which, though, and make no apologies. These two hawks are notoriously hard to tell apart. (My gut tells me Sharp-Shinned, and there are weak field markings to support this, but nothing conclusive.) The Cornell Lab of Ornithology even has a page on their website dedicated to figuring out the differences between these two hawks.
But why bother. It’s a bird hawk and it lives around here. It doesn’t know the name we call it. It doesn’t know my name, either, although it does know that I make it nervous when I stare, so it takes off. But it never goes far. We’ll cross paths again, probably tomorrow, this bird hawk and I. Whatever it’s called.
