Our Own Cooper's Hawk

Our Own Cooper's Hawk



This past summer we virtually had our own Cooper's Hawk, and we learned from it all sorts of things about them we hadn't known.

I forget exactly how it began.

If we sit on the porch we are looking down on a dug-out area about thirty by thirty feet and about four feet deep. The former owner had dug it out and leveled it, and put in a lawn for his children to play on. Trees had been planted all around for shade including, at the end,  a couple of now biggish olive trees. By now the children had grown and left; the grass was gone, just bare dirt where we had now set up various bird feeders. One day a very large (indicating it was a female) Cooper's Hawk landed at the end of the dug-out part, where we had set out several large saucers of water (which we had put there to attract wildlife). It was a beautiful bird. We zeroed in on it with our binoculars. I took some pictures of it. It took a long drink at one of the saucers. It then tipped back slightly to look upwards, opened its wings, and flew up into the lower branches of the olive tree. We could barely separate it from the wispy branches. The hawk remained there for over an hour, twice more dropping down for another long drink. Then it took off and flew away.

The next morning the bird returned and spent the day mostly concealed in the lower branches of the olive trees, as before dropping down from time to time to take a long drink, and in late afternoon flying away.

This became a daily pattern, and we became quite accustomed to seeing its black silhouette through the branches, and it got accustomed to seeing us, and did not fly off as long as we didn't make too much noise when we came outside.

One day as we happened to be watching, it burst out of the trees and began scrambling around somewhat awkwardly among the saucers, and then it mantled and we saw that it had caught a Round-tailed Ground Squirrel. This small quarrelsome rodent was another major prey animal in our yard equal in numbers to the quail. At any time you looked out you could see them chasing each other and having incredibly acrobatic kung-fu wrestling matches on open ground cratered by dozens of their burrows.

The hawk carried it up to the plucking tree. This time of course there was no shower of feathers, but it ripped up the skin and to open it up and ate a lot of it, and then since it was late afternoon it left the remainder on the tree and flew off to wherever it was that it spent the night.

When it returned the next day it went straight to the tree and finished the carcass. This was something we had not known that a Cooper's would do, stake out a kill and come back later to finish it. Then it immediately surprised us again by dropping down and grabbing another squirrel.

The squirrel was struggling to get away and it seemed that the hawk was having a hard time killing it.  Then the hawk did something that really surprised us. It very awkwardly, holding the squirrel with one foot,  used the other foot to bounce-walk over to one of the saucers, and then it quite deliberately pushed the squirrel into the saucer and held its head under water. When the squirrel stopped struggling, the hawk pulled it out of the water. When it recommenced its struggling, the hawk pushed it back into the water until it stopped for good.

 

As the days went on, we saw this behavior more than once, and when I mentioned this to our birdwatcher neighbors, they told me that the previous year they had had a Cooper's that had behaved exactly like that, coming every day and spending all day at their house, and they had seen it drowning its prey.

It was the hottest days (over 100 degrees) of summer, and there was no other dependable standing water in the neighborhood.and we could see how much our hawk drank every day. We theorized that the hawk came to us for the saucers we kept filled up and perhaps an extra was that squirrels were also attracted to the water. Now as we get into autumn and the hot weather is moderating, the hawk comes less often.

It will be interesting to see if it comes back next summer.