The Vista: An American Hiking Society Blog

My guess is an immature Cooper’s Hawk.
Its’ yellow eye indicates to me that it is immature.
I think Cooper’s over Sharp-shinned because it has:
a proportionately large head
little underbelly streaking
a roundish tail

I have a question for you too. Two days ago a "hawk" caught a robin in my back yard. It apparantly chased it and caught it as the robin bounced off our sun room window. The "hawk" seemed to strangle the robin with its talons to kill it. And, then it took an hour to 2 hours to eat it, leaving very little behind: the feet and just the wings with a very little bit of spinal cord or rib cage left. I would like to find out what kind of bird of prey it really was. It seemed to me to be a young bird, because it was so small, not too much bigger than the robin that it took down. Also, I thought that this might have been its first kill since it wasn't able to take it down in flight but chased into a collision with my window, and also since it spent 2 hours on the ground in my backyard eating it, after relocating about 20 feet back from the window after seeing my husband looking at it by the window. It was small for what I would call a hawk. It had solid darker grey on its back and its under side was lighter grey, nearly white. It may have had a fleck of lighter grey on the top of its wings, but it really looked solid with not much of a pattern. We live in Oklahoma City, so it was a shock to see this happen in town in our own backyard.