The Solitary Cooper's Hawk

The hawk who has attracted my fascination this winter flew overhead last week as I took a chilly and exhilarating ramble through my backyard.

First she glided, inches from the snow, into a thicket of bushes in my neighbor’s yard, where I had seen a colony of sparrows enjoying the bounty of a birdfeeder moments earlier. Then, she burst from the bushes, flapping over my head, then soaring over my roof, across the street, and into the yards beyond. I don’t know if she had caught any dinner; I was too busy watching her tail. It was rounded and not square.

I sprinted through shin-deep snow back to my house and turned to the Hawks page in my bird book. The tail distinction was what I needed to identify her, definitely, as a Cooper’s Hawk.

I watch her sit first on the peak of my neighbor’s A-frame house, then glide in lazy circles over our yards, then disappear over the crest of our hill. She returns with her talons full of a freshly caught creature and settles on a branch of a leafless tree to pick out a meal from her catch.

I never see another hawk, and my bird book says that they’re often solitary. And this may explain why I am so fascinated with her.

When I moved back to my parents’ house in June, I intended to leave in September or October after a brief and restful summer of reassessing the direction of my life. I had my family, but I no longer have my friends, who all moved away (as I did) after graduating from college.

I wonder if our Hawk considers her stint in my backyard as a temporary situation, as I still consider my stay here. She probably thinks, as she soars on the winds from the hills and mountains, that at some point, soon, she’ll fly away and find herself, if not a colony of Cooper’s Hawks, at least one other one.

She seems content here for now. But she sees the sparrows, blue jays, woodpeckers, and yellow-bellied sapsuckers, and knows that they may all be birds with wings and beaks, but they are not the same as her. Maybe she enjoys being the Only One of Her Kind watching over the activity of the neighborhood yards, but I think she’ll get lonely pretty soon. I think that someday I’ll notice she’s gone, and she’ll have found the place where she does belong, after a brief and restful winter in the bosom of my backyard.