Personal Consumer Issues • Bird watchers – what birds are you seeing?

This is not a RT hawk. Appears to be a juvenile Cooper's Hawk.

Thanks for chiming in. What are the tells for you? For so many years, I've seen various juvenile RT hawks and i confused them as Cooper's. This is the first time I observed the opposite.

Obv missing are the rust colored tail feathers, and i read that even (juvenile) RT hawks have that dark/light grey banding on their tails.

The Cooper's have wide dark banding on the tail and often have this prominent white tip and the tail is longer than a RT which is shorter with narrow banding. The thin brown streaking on the chest is more typical in the Cooper's and also the flat head towards the bill is typical of the Cooper's where the RT is generally more rounded.

Statistics: Posted by Candor — Sun Oct 12, 2025 7:14 pm — Replies 3489 — Views 371943

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