From a room in our house, my wife spied a Cooper’s hawk a few days ago. It wasn’t hard as it landed in a low branch about 10 feet from a window and gave her the stink eye for a few minutes as it observed the (many) chipmunks and squirrels that populate the stone retaining wall behind our hose. 

Yesterday I spent a lovely hour in the woods just listening and watching for evidence of where the local Coopers, red tails and broad wings are active this year, as we typically have at least two out of the three nest in the woods around us. About 10 minutes into sitting quietly a single crow flying over spotted me and cawed. Within a minute there were a dozen around me cawing as though I were an owl. They moved on after a few minutes and then started harrying something about 300-500 yards away from me. I made my way over and didn’t see the subject of their complaints, as it had been driven off to the northeast, but it did make a high pitched descending caw-like call that an adult Cooper’s will make. Raspier than that of a goshawk, I think, although I’m terrible about remembering sounds hours after I actually hear them. I’ve taken to taking a video of the ground after I hear a bird I want to remember, and use my voice to record an immitatation of what I heard so that I can compare later.  

In that area, I found a freshly remodeled 30x20-inch-wide nest, with numerous fresh hemlock boughs around the edge. 20 feet up in a gray birch sitting on the kissing point between a white pine stand, a mixed hardwood stand and a hemlock stand. Seemed quite low for hawks nests around here. I don’t want to revisit it for fear of making the birds disinterested in the site but plan to return a few days after the typically hatch out date for the species. Only I’m not sure what species would make this nest. Here is a picture…

https://adobe.ly/2DWDK22

There are dozens of old nests in this roughly 100 acres of area of the property that are suitable for these nests, but only a couple are this low, and not a single one in a gray birch. Nor do I recall so much hemlock lining on top. The Cooper’s that I’ve been observing for the past few years have all been nesting extremely high in the trees at a range of between 70-80 feet up, and the only hemlock I observed was bark chips at the bottom of the bowl. The other two species I know have been nesting here are red tails (only last year observed) and broad-wings. Very curious to learn what’s building that nest, but don’t want to jinx it by visiting. 

To add still more confusion, from a large distance away my wife spotted a juvenile broad wing roughly over that area, and I spotted a goshawk very high over it 2 weeks ago. Have fingers crossed will have some hawk babies again this year. 

-Tig Tillinghast


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