Mallinger's Coop

Photo by Wayne Mallinger

My friend Wayne Mallinger sent me this great photo of a juvenile Cooper's Hawk this week. You can tell it's a first year bird because it still has a brown back. When it matures these feathers will molt gray. The two Accipiters in our area can be hard to tell apart. Is it a Cooper's hawk or a sharp-shinned hawk? 

Cooper's hawks are roughly crow-sized and sharp-shinned hawks are blue-jay size but size is hard to judge in a photo or in the field unless you have something to compare it to.

So what field marking do you look for?

My friend Dr. Cheryl Greenacre at the UT Veterinary Teaching Hospital sees a lot of injured birds up close. She looks in the mouth. Inside a Cooper's is black, a sharp-shinned is pink. But we never see one that closely or that disabled.

Both the Accipiters have extra long tails. The clue for us is the very end of the tail. Cooper's have a rounded tail that ends in a noticeable band of white. Sharpies have a blunt or squared-off tail with so little white it is hard to see. 

I have a program scheduled on Identifying Local Birds of Prey at Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge on Wednesday, May 8.

Thanks, Wayne.

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