A Chihuahua of a Bird

Wednesday morning I took my garbage to the dumpster at the end of the street and it was such a beautiful morning I took the long way around to get back to my house.  Along the way, I found a little dead hawk lying in the grass by the side of the road.  I think it was an immature Cooper's Hawk.  The majority of its innards were gone, probably eaten by a possum, but I got a close look at its sharp little beak, its talons, and coloring.  I used a plastic bag to pick it up and walked it back to the dumpster.  I don't know why it died.  It was lying beside a telephone pole with the accompanying tangle of cables and wires.  As an inexperienced hunter it may have misjudged a distance or possibly been electrocuted by an electric line.

Immature juvenile   Source:  Wikipedia

It may have been a male.  They are smaller in size than the females, males being 14 to 18 inches in length, the females 17 to 20 inches.  Cooper's hawks are found from Canada to Mexico, the northern most birds migrating as far as Panama.  Rock doves and mourning doves are the Cooper's favorite prey, although smaller jays, robins and starlings are also on the menu, not to mention an occasion mouse or chipmunk.  Most Cooper's hawks mate for life and are monogamous.  Pairs raise from 3 to 5 chicks each breeding season.

Mature adult   Source:  Wikipedia

The Cooper's hawk is considered a small-sized hawk, but small can also mean insignificant, weak, inferior.  Like the Chihuahua, in attitude this bird is definitely not small.  The Cooper's hawk relies on an ambush style of hunting, erupting from cover, flying through dense vegetation.  In a study in which 300 skeletons of Cooper's hawks were examined 23% were found to have healed fractures in the bones of their chest!

I thought about taking a photo, but made the deliberate decision to not have a picture of a dead bird on my blog!  In the whole scheme of things one dead bird is not necessarily significant, but I didn't want to trivialize the demise of this beautiful little bird that never got a chance to grow up.