A neighbor had been hearing some strange sounds for more than a day; she was pretty sure they were bird calls and asked if I would come check it out. As I walked toward her house, I heard it, too, nearly constant high-pitched screeching whistles, so we followed the sounds to a quiet, residential street featuring tall oaks on the boulevard.
Handsome and lethal, bird-eating hawks live among us
Cooper’s hawks make themselves at home in the cities and suburbs.
For the Minnesota Star Tribune
March 6, 2025 at 3:35PM
Looking up, we were astonished to see Cooper’s hawks overhead, jumping from branch to branch and making all that noise, four of them, doubtless youngsters. We could see a nest, too, now that we were looking closely, and an adult bird suddenly flew in, exciting the young hawks, who seemed very hungry.
Strange as it seemed, a pair of Cooper’s hawks had built a nest and raised their brood right in my neighborhood, with a steady parade of people walking and driving and going about their daily lives beneath their nest tree.
For the next couple of weeks, I often saw the young hawks moving about the neighborhood, perched on utility wires, flopping onto branches and invariably calling to their parents or each other — they were a noisy bunch. They must have struck terror in the hearts of the local feeder birds, because Cooper’s hawks are bird-eating hawks.
Was it unusual for these forest birds to nest right in the city? Apparently not:
“Cooper’s hawks have adapted extremely well to urban life,” says Lori Arent, interim director of the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota. Cities offer an abundance of feeder birds to eat and large, older trees to nest in.
In the waning days of summer, a new sound replaced the hawks’ calls: blue jays assuming the role of “hall monitors,” screeching and making their “jeer” call loudly whenever they spied a hawk, warning other birds of danger. The small birds at my feeders and feeding on the ground would dash for shelter whenever the jays made a ruckus, hoping to avoid becoming a raptor meal.
Not all were successful: In the next couple of weeks, I found several loose piles of feathers indicating a Cooper’s hawk had snatched a bird and had plucked its catch from a perch in a tree or shrub. Researchers have studied Cooper’s hawks by attaching transmitters to their backs, revealing that starlings, mourning doves and pigeons make up the majority of their diet. But smaller birds don’t know this, and whenever a hawk is in the area, they scatter to the wind.
Life is a challenge for all birds, even for bird-eating birds. There are diseases like West Nile Virus, parasites in their prey and collisions with windows and vehicles. And if they don’t become proficient hunters by the time their parents stop caring for them, they will starve. Arent cited an estimate that 60% of young hawks don’t survive their first year.
The Raptor Center admits a number of Cooper’s hawk youngsters each year, after collisions with vehicles and windows cause fractures or trauma that impairs their ability to fly.
Cities and suburbs might even be safer for these hawks than their traditional forested environment. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology found that 25% of Cooper’s hawk skeletons had healed-over fractures of their chest bones, breaks caused by pursuing prey in thick forests and running into branches.
Nature tooth and claw, we say, and Cooper’s hawks and their prey live it every day.
St. Paul resident Val Cunningham, who volunteers with bird organizations and writes about nature for local, regional and national newspapers and magazines, can be reached at valwrites@comcast.net.
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