Click the >Play button
to listen to the bird's song!

Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii)

Length (adult ) 15 ½ in., wingspan 28 in., Family Accipitridae

The Cooper’s is a medium-sized hawk with broad, rounded wings and a long tail. Its beak is dark and, like all hawks’ beaks, hooked.

We are more likely to see a hawk as a dark silhouette overhead or hear its “Keeyer, keeyer” cries than to get a good look at its feathers. This predator flies with several quick wingbeats followed by a short glide, but may also be seen circling high in the sky or floating lazily on the wind.

If you are lucky enough to see a perched hawk that may be a Cooper’s, look for:  blue-gray back and upper wings, black cap, white breast and belly marked by thin rusty or peach streaks, tail gray above, pale below, with wide black bands.

Young (“immature”) Cooper’s Hawks are brown where their elders are gray, have yellow eyes instead of red, and the thin lines that streak their white chests are black instead of rust. Their black-banded tails end in a final white band.

The two genders look alike except for size: Cooper’s females are larger than males. This makes a Cooper’s almost impossible to distinguish from the smaller Sharp-shinned Hawk, because the female Sharpy is the same size as the male Cooper’s! Immature Northern Goshawks are another look-alike, but larger, with shorter tails and thick black streaks on their undersides. Don’t feel bad if you can’t make a positive ID. Hawks are hard for even the experts to identify!

Cooper’s Hawks dine on small mammals like mice and often snatch small birds like goldfinches right off bird feeders in mid-flight. If all the birds at your backyard feeder fly away or “freeze,” look up – a hawk is in the neighborhood.