{"id":171200,"date":"2026-05-05T07:12:31","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T13:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=171200"},"modified":"2026-05-05T11:16:04","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T17:16:04","slug":"my-40-minute-session-with-a-coopers-hawk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/05\/my-40-minute-session-with-a-coopers-hawk\/","title":{"rendered":"My 40 Minute Session With A Cooper’s Hawk"},"content":{"rendered":"

And some good medical news.<\/p>\n

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted to Feathered Photography and readers deserve to know why. The reasons are all medically related and they have nothing to do with my bad back. Following is an explanation. It’s complicated, so many of the details will have to be left out but here are the basics.<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve already told readers that I have an aortic aneurism that a recent CT scan revealed has grown to the point that it will have to be repaired fairly soon (potentially a complicated and dangerous surgery). But a recent visit with my vascular surgeon revealed that that interpretation of my scan wasn’t completely accurate. It turns out that my aneurism hasn’t<\/span> grown since my previous CT scan a year ago so I’m in the clear, at least for now.<\/em><\/p>\n

The same CT scan also revealed that I have something going on in my liver which the radiologist said needed to be checked out by further testing – it could be a relatively harmless hematoma but it could also be liver cancer. I stewed over that one for a while before I eventually got a phone call from my primary care physician who said that he had contacted the radiologist and the two of them compared my most recent CT scan to another scan from six years ago. It turns out that I had the same liver abnormality six years ago that I have now, so it’s almost certainly a hematoma and not cancer.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

As you can imagine, I’m incredibly relieved by two bits of very good medical news in such a short time. But the entire process took about six weeks of CT scans, specialized sonograms, medical tests and doctor visits. Between all the medical stuff going on and the worry and stress it generated, bird photography and posting to my blog weren’t high on my list of priorities. So I didn’t post for over five weeks.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

OK, with that out of the way, let’s move on to something more interesting.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the early evening two days ago I was sitting on my patio with my camera on my tripod, waiting for something interesting to happen on or near one of my four bird feeders. Eventually I got bored and turned my attention to my phone. After nearly five full minutes of being involved in a text conversation I finally looked up again and this is what I saw.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The neighborhood Cooper’s Hawk was perched on my grape vine less than 30′ away from me (I measured the distance later).<\/p>\n

I have no idea how long ‘he’ had been there but I know what he was doing. He was hunting birds in four places from the same secluded hunting perch – my feeders to his left, my friend Shane’s feeders on the other side of my fence and grape vine, the grape vine itself and he was also hunting birds that had flown in a panic when he arrived and hid beneath my wooden deck to his right. About a week ago I saw him catch a sparrow that made the mistake of coming out from beneath my deck.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I took a quick (blurry) cell phone photo to document the setting. The hawk is circled in red. That’s the end of my lens on the left side of the frame.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

He was so close I had to shoot vertically to give him any room at all in the frame. This photo is full frame (uncropped).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I had to remove my teleconverter to shoot horizontally. This photo is also full frame.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

He almost broke his neck every time a bird flew over, which was fairly often.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Eventually he’d been there for so long he needed to stretch and…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

preen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

He also let fly with a pretty impressive poop.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Finally, after I’d been with him for 39 minutes, he turned around on his perch to provide a pretty good look at his front side.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another wing and tail stretch.<\/p>\n

About a minute later I saw his head and eyes follow an overhead bird from his left to his right. From the direction he ended up looking I could tell that the bird of interest landed on top of the grapevine to his right. The hawk was so tucked away beneath the branches of the grapevine I’m almost certain that the bird hadn’t seen him. That bird wouldn’t have landed where he did if it had.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The hawk took off after the bird so fast I clipped his bill.<\/p>\n

When I pulled my eye away from the lens the last thing I saw was the hawk hot on the tail of the bird as they both flew over my house behind me. The bird he was after turned out to be one of my very favorites – the only Yellow-headed Blackbird, a handsome male, that visits my feeders.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here he is. Photo taken last week.<\/p>\n

The blackbird visits reliably several times every day. So when I didn’t see him for most of the day yesterday I was afraid he was a goner. But he finally showed up again late yesterday afternoon.<\/p>\n

I’ll admit it, I’m relieved. I’m very fond of that bird. Not many can say they have a Yellow-headed Blackbird visiting their yard.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Note: Some readers may wonder why my grape vine looks dead. About ten days ago we had two back-to-back nights of hard frost, followed by four more nights of lighter frost. Those two coldest nights froze all the leaves on my grape vine and four catalpa trees and badly damaged my roses and trumpet vine. At this point I still don’t know if some of them will survive, especially one of my catalpa trees.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And some good medical news. (12 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171207,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334],"tags":[6516,95,7929,311,898],"class_list":["post-171200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","tag-aortic-aneurism","tag-coopers-hawk","tag-liver-hematoma","tag-utah-2","tag-yellow-headed-blackbird"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/coopers-hawk-4451-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-Ixi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171200"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171246,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171200\/revisions\/171246"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}