When I returned to the visitors center I was very pleased to see the hawk fly right back down to where it had been. So while I did disturb it, which I don’t enjoy doing, I didn’t disturb it for long. Granted, it’s unlikely it remained down there for much longer as shortly afterwards I saw a person walking their dog along that trail.
Identification
I’m not currently very skilled at identifying hawks, especially in the field. But I created enough photographs that I was able to piece together the species at home. One of the first things I noticed was the length of its tail. This seemed to point to either a Cooper’s hawk or a sharp-shinned hawk, which are both in this area and have longer tails than many other hawks.
This hawk seemed to be a somewhat chunky bird which pointed more towards a Cooper’s which is larger than the sharp-shinned.
Another difference between the two is that Cooper’s tend to have more rounded tail feathers, whereas sharp-shinned are more angular. This can be difficult to tell, as it was in this case, but the end of the tail feathers did appear a little more rounded.
I did struggle, though, in accepting that it might be a Cooper’s hawk because the coloration didn’t match the majority of the photos I’d seen. But this is what actually led to the identification of it being an adolescent Cooper’s hawk, with that nice bright white chest with streaks of dark brown. As it grows older it will lose some of that bright white in the chest and its back feathers will turn a darker grey-blue.
Resources
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I used a number of resources to help with the ID. My go-to field guide is the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, which uses paintings. I also like using the Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, which uses photos. In this case, though, I found Peterson’s Hawks of North America to be extremely helpful. Being specific to hawks it included more pictures and descriptions and used both paintings and photographs. Finally, to double check my own ID I used the phone apps, Seek and Merlin Bird ID, feeding them photos of the bird. Both agreed with the ID of a Cooper’s hawk.