Description
A young Cooper’s hawk perched in a lichen-crusted tree against hard blue sky, looking off to the side with that pale, slightly startled yellow eye. Brown above, cream below with fine vertical streaking, and a long banded tail hanging down behind the branch.
Everything in that description marks him as a juvenile. An adult Cooper’s hawk is a completely different-looking bird: slate blue-gray across the back, warm rufous barring running horizontally across the chest, and a deep red eye. The young wear brown and vertical streaks and pale yellow eyes, and it takes a couple of years to trade one uniform for the other.
Set him beside the red-tailed hawks in this collection and the design logic jumps out. The red-tail has long broad wings and a short fan of a tail, built to hang on a thermal above open ground. This bird is the opposite airframe: short rounded wings and a long rudder of a tail, built for hard turns at speed through cluttered branches. An accipiter does not soar and wait. It ambushes, and then it chases — through hedges, around trunks, under fences.
That style of hunting has a documented cost. When researchers examined Cooper’s hawk skeletons, a startling share carried healed fractures in the bones of the chest — injuries from hitting branches at full speed while flying down a songbird. They break themselves fairly regularly, mend, and go back to doing it.
Which is also why this is the hawk most people meet. If something is picking off birds at your feeder, it is almost certainly a Cooper’s — they have moved into cities enthusiastically, because we have helpfully installed thousands of small feeding stations that concentrate their prey in the open. It is not a malfunction of the yard. It is a food chain arriving in full, and if it bothers you, taking the feeder down for a week or two moves the hawk along.
This is a high-resolution digital download of the photograph, made in Portland, Oregon — yours to print for your home or office, set as a wallpaper, or simply keep.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 3424 × 2464 pixels — sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 11 × 8 inches at 300 DPI, and larger at normal wall viewing distances. Delivered as an instant download the moment your order is complete.
License: Personal use only. Print it for your own home, use it as a wallpaper or screen background, enjoy it yourself. Not licensed for commercial use, resale, redistribution, or AI training. © Jonathan Swanson / JonSwan Productions. All rights reserved.