A couple notes on Cooper's hawks, since that has been a recent topic of discussion.

I have a pair that regularly ambushes my feeders.  I'm ambivalent about this.  I admire the beauty and skill of the Cooper's - they are, after all, birds too, and I'm a bird lover, but I'm particulary sympathetic to those birds who feed in my yard.  If Coop limited his take to starlings (the first bird I ever saw a Coop take in my yard, several years ago), or even mourning doves, which are overabundant, I would cheer him on.  But when he dive bombs my goldfinches, etc., I'm not so enthusiastic a supporter.

I've seen Coop chase a goldfinch through my yard, into a neighbor's yard - the goldfinch going through my neighbor's breezeway and Coop going over it - through the large old crabapple tree, and into a mature blue spruce across the road.  I never saw either bird leave the spruce, but my bet was on Coop, whom I have referred to as Top Gun every since.  I've seen Top Gun take a mourning dove out of mature hemlock trees in another neighbor's yard.  I also suspect that Coop or Top Gun has made a habit of coming into my yard from the south in the hopes that excited birds will crash into the door to my breezeway, which has happened on more than one occasion, based on feather evidence.

However, today, Coop came to an ignominious end.  When I got home from church, the birds were the noisiest I have heard them in some time.  I was thinking that they were misguidedly believing that spring was imminent.  Not so - Coop was dead.  He had crashed into that same glass door into which he had driven panicked sparrows and finches so many times, only he had come in from the north.  For the first time, the other birds were free from fear of a sudden raid and were celebrating victory with joyful song.  At least, that was my take on the situation.

Margaret Bowman
Awaiting spring impatiently in
Licking Co., OH

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