There's a Hawk at My Bird Feeder

A silent, empty garden usually means one thing. Everything has frozen or gone to cover, and there is a hawk sitting somewhere nearby.

Which hawk

Almost certainly an accipiter — the group built for chasing birds through trees.

Cooper's hawk is the common one at feeders. Crow-sized, slim, with short rounded wings and a long banded tail, flying in a distinctive flap-flap-glide. Adults are blue-grey above with fine rusty barring below and a dark cap; young birds are brown with brown streaking on white.

Sharp-shinned hawk is smaller — jay-sized — and otherwise very similar. The classic separation is the tail tip: squared on a sharp-shinned, rounded on a Cooper's. Head projection helps too, since a Cooper's head sticks out well beyond the wrists in flight. Honestly, this pair defeats experienced birders regularly, and leaving it at "an accipiter" is respectable.

Not a red-tailed hawk. Those are bulky, broad-winged soaring birds that hunt rodents in open country from a pole. One will sit on a garden fence occasionally, but it is not what empties a feeder.

Why it is there

You have concentrated its food supply into one place, in the open, several times a day.

That is not a criticism. A feeder is a reliable prey aggregation, and accipiters have adapted to suburbs precisely because we built them. Cooper's hawks are now more common in many towns than in the countryside.

What to do

Nothing is a legitimate answer. The hawk is a native bird doing what it evolved to do, and it is protected by law. A garden that supports songbirds supporting a hawk is a garden that is working.

If you would rather not watch it: take the feeders down for one to two weeks. Without the aggregation the hawk moves on, and the songbirds disperse to natural food and come back when you refill.

If you want to keep feeding: make the feeder area survivable.

• Put cover within about two metres — a dense shrub, a brush pile, an evergreen. Small birds need somewhere to dive into. Cover too far away is worse than none, because it makes them fly the gap.
• Avoid open lawn feeders with no escape route.
• Several small feeders spread out rather than one busy one.
• Do not put cover immediately beside the feeder either, because that is where cats wait. About two metres is the working compromise.

What not to do

• Do not harass, trap, relocate or harm it. All native hawks in the United States are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and the penalties are serious.
• Do not put out food to distract it. It will not work and it habituates the bird.
• Do not leave the dead bird if one is taken and abandoned — bury it or bin it, to avoid drawing scavengers and disease.

What you are actually seeing

An accipiter kill is fast and usually over before anyone reacts. The hawk holds the prey on the ground with its feet and often plucks in place, which is what people find on the lawn afterwards — a scatter of feathers with the quills clean and unbroken. A pile of feathers with the ends chewed off is a mammal, usually a cat or a fox.

A hawk on the window

Occasionally a hunting accipiter hits the glass while chasing something. The response is the same as for any strike — a dark, ventilated box, somewhere quiet, no food or water, and a rehabilitator if it does not recover within a couple of hours. What to do when a bird hits a window covers it, and the same treatment applies to a raptor, with the caution that the feet are the dangerous end and thick gloves are sensible.