By Jerry Sullivan
Both of these recent sightings were major departures from that pattern. The first clue to the Miami Woods nest was a bird flying toward us, calling loudly–a rapid ki-ki-ki that all the authorities say is given only around the nest. This bird landed high in a tree not more than 100 feet away and just sat in full view while we got a long look at it.
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I was with Judy Pollock, a birder from Evanston who is conducting a nesting survey at Miami Woods this year. We were laying out survey points for her when the Cooper’s showed up. The call and the unusually tame behavior strongly suggested that we were near a nest. So we started scanning the treetops around us, and suddenly there it was–a shallow bowl of sticks in the crotch of a tree at least 30 feet up. And perched on the rim of the bowl was the other member of the Cooper’s hawk pair. Based on comparative sizes, I would say the first bird we saw was a male and the bird on the nest was a female.
And the evidence is very strong that they love chickens. Why wouldn’t they? Chickens offer a lot of meat, and they are typically penned up–a circumstance that would make them very easy to catch. Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds calls the Cooper’s hawk a bloodthirsty villain, noting, “It is essentially the chicken hawk, so cordially hated by poultry farmers, and is the principal cause of the widespread antipathy toward hawks in general.”
There is reason to believe that the Cooper’s hawk and the sharp-shinned hawk are mutually intolerant. If a woodland contains a nest of one it will probably not have a nest of the other. Habitat preferences could affect this distribution as well. Cooper’s hawks may prefer more open woodlands than the sharp-shinned. The decline of the Cooper’s hawk in Illinois may be partly attributed to the loss of the open oak woodlands that were typical of the state at the time of settlement. This reading would suggest that the denser woods of today are not good Cooper’s hawk habitat. Both the Miami Woods and Swallow Cliff Woods nest sites are in areas being restored to a more open condition. That could be important, although two pairs of birds are a slim base for drawing any major conclusions.
