May 19, 2023

Fun With Birds
Oro Valley, Arizona
2023

At the other end of the size spectrum of birds around the place we were staying in Arizona, is this Cooper’s Hawk. It was sitting in a tree above the neighbor’s birdfeeder when I was out in the driveway one morning. Presumably it was scoping out the small birds at the feeder for a quick breakfast. Not sure what kind of hawk it was, I used the great Merlin phone app to identify it’s call. The app will record the call and try and identify the bird and it also gives a number of recordings by others to listen to for comparison. Just for fun I started playing some of the calls of other Cooper’s Hawks while holding the phone up where this one might hear it. Boy did I get it’s attention, to the point that it eventually made several flying passes right above me trying to figure out where the hawk was that was calling out. That was really cool but I quit doing it pretty quickly for a couple of reasons. One, I thought what I was doing might be considered some sort of bird torment. But I also stopped because those claws looked pretty sharp up close and I didn’t want to see if it would decide to use them on me out of frustration or protection of territory.