Around Thanksgiving I put up our bird feeders for the winter hoping the bears had gone to bed. So we are once again treated to myriad species of songbirds in large numbers - consuming over 20 pounds of seeds in under 2 weeks. A few days ago while drinking my early morning coffee by the window and watching this colorful daily feeding frenzy, I noticed what I thought at first was a mourning dove in the red maple 20 feet from the feeders. It was ruffled looking as if it had just bathed in the koi pond and was drying out in the morning sun. But suddenly all of the feeders were empty, and I knew something was up.
I grabbed my camera and went out for a closer look around. The somewhat larger than normal “mourning dove” was still perched in the red maple preening itself and oblivious to whatever had panicked the other birds. Then I realized that I had mistaken the predator for its prey. This was not a mourning dove, but a small hawk. Now I could see the bright yellow eyes (clearly a juvenile since adult hawks have orange eyes), the threatening beak, and the lethal-looking talons.
This was a juvenile sharp-shinned hawk, or sharpie, as it is known among birders more experienced than I. The smallest hawk found in North America, a sharpie is difficult to distinguish from its almost twin, the Coopers hawk. In fact, amateur that I am, I had to post a photo of this fellow on the Bird Watchers of New Hampshire Facebook page for help distinguishing it from a Cooper’s hawk.
Sharp-shinned hawks get their name from their skinny legs (Coopers have fat legs - but don’t tell them that). They are smaller than Coopers, but that’s no help to me unless they were willing to stand side by side. And female sharpies are 30% larger than males so nearly the size of a male Coopers hawk. (Unlike most other classes of birds, male raptors and owls are quite a bit smaller than their female counterparts, so that domestic disputes are settled in a matriarchal manner.)
Sharpies belong to the genus accipiter along with Coopers hawks and the much larger and more rare northern goshawks. They have shorter wings and longer tails than other raptors allowing them extreme maneuverability and acceleration. Accipiters process visual information twice as fast as humans (one of our movies at 30 frames a second would look like a slideshow to a sharpie) so they can glide among trees under the forest canopy at 30 miles an hour to pounce upon careless or luckless songbirds in flight.
Most likely my sharp-shinned hawk was just passing through on its way to wintering in Florida or the Caribbean. But then, perhaps migration season has passed, and he will be hanging around keeping a sharp eye on our feeders all winter - thus my advice to the songbirds to look sharp and be sharp.
Maybe you’d like to write a poem about sharp-shinned hawks, because I couldn’t find one to add here. But, here’s the opening of one by William Henry Davies that seems to apply.
The Hawk by William Henry Davies
Thou dost not fly, thou art not perched,
The air is all around:
What is it that can keep thee set,
From falling to the ground?
The concentration of thy mind
Supports thee in the air;
As thou dost watch the small young birds,
With such a deadly care.
If you’re interested, here is my July 2020 blog about hawks.