Cooper's Hawk

From Photo of the day 2011

This little guy came to hunt around our birdfeeder and the neighbour's back yard this morning. There has been another juvenile hanging around the last couple of days, not sure if it was him - I thought the other one was a female, but not sure. He has bands on from Andy Stewart - a local researcher who bands most of the cooper's hawks in Victoria. Blue bands are male, red are female. I've sent off the numbers to (hopefully) get a bit of a backstory on this particular bird. I had some pictures I went outside to get when he was further back in our yard, this was from his second visit this morning, and I shot all three through our dining room picture window.

From Photo of the day 2011

Just a different pose, another good shot from a larger series I shot while waiting for him to take off.

From Photo of the day 2011

This one I think is very cool - even though the bird has a bit of motion blur. For the speed he would have been going I was suprised how well he came out and that I actually got all of his head in the frame (just). He had just launched himself from the previous branch and was chasing a crow. It was just as cool as watching my own bird hunt - he had his feet on the crow, tussled with it in the air for a bit before he lost it and chased it up over our roof and flew away. Not suprisingly all our feeder-visiting finches were sitting very still and quiet in the labernum tree!