After the family Christmas gathering, E the M and I made our way down the California coast towards the M’s house.  Every few years we find ourselves doing this, stopping sometimes in Santa Cruz, sometimes Big Sur or Davenport, but more than once in Cambria.  The twee shops in the village don’t draw us as much as the surrounding coastal landscape, gentler and less remote than the raw edge of the Big Sur coast (that jagged and temporary fringe of an entire continent): it’s less dramatic but more accessible.  Humans are not the only organisms to find this coast attractive: Sea otters, harbor seals, dolphins, and gray whales can readily be seen in season in these waters; also, northern elephant seals.

In our long ago years at Santa Cruz, E and I would visit the elephant seal rookery at the point Año Nuevo, in those days the only place the enormous pinnipeds were known to haul out on the mainland.  The visit involved advance reservations and a naturalist-led slog through seal-festooned dunes to a viewing point looking down on the rookeries and the island lighthouse of Año Nuevo, in which, the story was told, the lighthouse-keeper’s claw-footed bathtub still contained the skeletal remains of an elephant seal that had crawled into it to die.

So, imagine our surprise when we pulled off from Hwy 1 to hike a bluff trail just north of San Simeon — a hundred miles south of Año Nuevo — and looked over to see a heaving heap of snorting, snoring blubber, jostling and making the same distinctive bladdery croaking sound (described as a Harley starting up in a gymnasium, listen here: 02-alpha.mp3) that we remembered from the rookery north of Santa Cruz.  Since 1990, Elephant seals have colonized the narrow strands stretching south of Piedras Blancas lighthouse, and each December, they return to give birth and mate on these beaches.  Viewing them is easy — a couple of  parking areas have been built atop the bluffs along coast Hwy 1, and low-visibility fences are in place to separate scarred, cantankerous males from pesky human voyeurs.  By mid-December, bulls have staked out their section of beach, and cows are lying about in harems.  The real draw, though, is the young of the year: wrinkled black-furred seal pups lying at their mothers’ side, chirping and bawling until she rolls over to expose a teat, or, rather, a slot where the teat lurks.

We’ve never been lucky enough to see an actual birth, but we’ve seen such newly-born pups that gulls and Brewer’s blackbirds were still fighting over afterbirth among the sandy heaps of seaweed. Last year 4000 pups were born just in the Piedras Blancas rookery, and they’re expecting similar numbers this year.  The density of seals is astounding: in addition to hefty 1600 pound cows, massive 4500 pound bulls, and an assortment of bulky young males, there are piles of blond yearlings lying about in the dunes, snuffling and spraying briny snot on one another, occasionally engaging in mock baby-fights, baring their teeth and striking at each other in practice territorial behavior, then falling back into a doze piled together in heaps like bleached drift logs.

For those of us less inclined to gawk at the unnatural concentration of the world’s riches crammed into William Randolph Heart’s folly (the ersatz Moorish castle overlooks the rookeries), the Piedras Blancas elephant seals put on a different type of oversized spectacle.  Check out the website of Friends of the Elephant Seal for more info and images.

A tip to would-be visitors to Piedras Blancas Rookery: Because viewing access is easy here, there are lots of people, and parking can be problematic.  So, go early (before 10am) or late (after 4 pm, and sunsets can be spectacular!).  Or, visit alternate viewing sites along the same coastal bluffs, where you will see fewer seals, but fewer people, too.  For a less drive-up experience of the seals than at Piedras Blancas, take a hiking tour out to the rookery at Año Nuevo, but don’t forget to get advanced reservations for peak breeding months (Dec -Mar).

By the way, if curious architectural follies of eccentrics do appeal, drive by the eclectic Nitwit Ridge in Cambria, in disrepair but surprisingly resonant with Hearst Castle.

It was leaning, but not that much.  On Thanksgiving morning while we had breakfast (E, the M, and me), it fell with a huge thump from no particular direction. Later, E found the saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea): under the back mesquite, lying split like a toppled Doric column on top of beloved cax and sux, some in the ground, some in pots on shelves. Its weight had splintered a 2×12 pine shelf, cracking it nearly in two.  It popped a mature barrel cactus out of the ground roots and all, and launched pots in the air, so that they landed in uprooted piles.  It took all three of us to dig out the victims pinned under the wreckage, embedded in green flesh, impaled on spines.  Lots of crushed plants, but only two pots lost and only one hand-made one; a small clay “miracle”.  Still, it was gruesome, and the saguaro, although probably 50 years old, wasn’t anywhere near the end of its expected life span.  It hadn’t even grown arms yet, like some of the older saguaros in this mature desert neighborhood.

Pictures tell the story best.

In order to remove the plants from under it, we had to prop the saguaro incrementally up onto cinder blocks, where it now lies abandoned like an old car, awaiting decomposition, its length unnaturally separated from the soil below.  Sadly, as damaged as it is, it looks very whole even lying there, and a few of its roots, still buried in the damp desert soil, are so far keeping it green and living, a support system that won’t bring life back.

Every once in a while, I find a clay pot — a tiny, perfect clay pot — on the wall of the house.  They look like little half-buried Mediterranean amphorae, without handles, with a narrow neck and a flared rim, the entire thing only half an inch across.  But they have no openings: like the false-necked vessels drachmai-conscious Athenian families left at the graves of loved ones — they looked full of precious oil while only actually containing a thimbleful — these tiny pots are sealed at the top.  Sometimes, however, they have a hole in the side, as if a micro-tomb-robber struck the belly of the pot with a spade, to sift through the contents.

A little spadework in books and on the internet turned up the answer to who the tiny potters in our yard might be : Microdynerus arenicolus, the Antioch Potter Wasp, who builds up this mud cell for its offspring one mouthful of clay at a time.

You would think a wasp bringing mouthful after mouthful of mud to a wall right by the front door might be observed easily, but I’ve never knowingly seen one of these wasps on the job.  What I can glean about the appearance and habits of the Antioch Potter Wasp is that they are about half-an-inch long, live in California, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and are solitary wasps.  The adults have creamy white or yellow and black markings, and there are subtle differences in coloring and morphology between males and females that are probably mostly important to other wasps and entomologists.  (The photo on the left is not our Potter Wasp, it’s a related species from Australia.)  The females have stingers, but are “docile”.  They are also “domestic”: it’s the female who does all the housework.  Here’s what an Arizona Game and Fish document says about the Antioch Potter Wasp:

These are solitary wasps, each female constructing nests and provisioning them for her own offspring. Each nest looks like a small jug, about half an inch in diameter, with a short sealed neck. When the female decides to make a cell, she selects a sheltered place, and then carries dollops of mud there for construction. This is a precision process with a thin walled pot resulting. When the pot is almost completed, with just room for her to get her head in, she starts to provision the cell with hairless caterpillars, which she has paralyzed by stinging them in the central nervous system. Once the cell is full she lays an egg on the prey and restarts the cell making process. She adds mud to the edges of the nearly spherical pot. Closing the sphere presents problems that are solved by simply adding extra mud and leaving a small neck. The larva that hatches from the egg eats the prey, spins a cocoon inside the pot and pupates. When the new adult is ready to leave the pot, it simply makes a hole in the side and leaves. Using the neck would be logical but that is where the pot is the thickest.

–Arizona Game and Fish Department. 2004. Microdynerus arenicolus. Unpublished abstract compiled and edited by the Heritage Data Management System, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Phoenix, AZ. 4 pp.

Unless you’re a hairless caterpillar, this is a fascinating process.  Especially for a potter: the technique of building a pot from the bottom up, adding little bits of clay at a time, and contouring it as you go is exactly the technique potters use to build vessels or vessel-like sculptures.  Vessels of any size and shape can be made as long as the supply of moist clay holds out: the potter wasp makes her own by carrying a mouthful of water to a dry clay source and mixing it up to the right consistency and carrying it to the construction site.  To the right is a picture of a Three Star Owl VLO (Very Large Owl) being constructed in the same way as a potter wasp builds her nest.  (It will be more than two feet tall and at this point lacked its face.  Please note that the finished owl sculpture was not provisioned with hairless caterpillars nor were any eggs at all laid during the process.)

I determined to keep an eye on the little wasp-pot, hoping to see a new wasp break free and fly away, to carry on the work of potter wasps in the yard.  Of course, the next time I looked, there was the hole, and the empty belly of the tiny clay amphora — the wasp had flown.  Here’s a picture of the hole made from the inside out by the wasp itself, not a grave robber after all:

Etymology

The common name, Antioch Potter Wasp, seems like a very appropriately Mediterranean name for an organism that makes structures that look like amphorae, the storage and shipping vessels found all over the Mediterranean region from about the 13th century BC until the 7th century AD.  But it’s mere coincidence, and not connected with the ancient city of Antioch on the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean (the stretch of land from which the earliest amphorae, the so-called “Canaanite jars”, come), a hub of commerce and shipping.  The species was given its name from the town of Antioch, California, also a hub of commerce and shipping, where the type specimen was collected and described.

(Photos: #1, 3, 4, A.Shock, Three Star Owl.  #2, from the following site: http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_wasps/images/MudDau7.jpg, no photo credit found)

Here is a photo of a lovely Red barrel cactus in Miss Thang’s garden.

The barrel is happy where it is, and is growing quickly and healthily.  Unfortunately, we’ve had a Bermuda Grass invasion nearby, and despite E‘s manual, non-toxic efforts to control the grass, it’s spread up to the Red Barrel.  It was bad enough when the awful spikes of grass began to come up around the fat base of the cactus, but look closely — at about 3 o’clock on the shadowy right side of the barrel, there is a double spike of insidious grassy green poking out between the cactus’s ribs, inside the cage of the spines.  That is a Bermuda grass shoot growing out through the side of the barrel!  The horrid monocot grew around and under the cactus, and sent up sharp new shoots through its flesh and out its skin about 4 inches up from the soil line, where it’s now established itself contentedly at the expense of the barrel’s structural integrity.  I imagine roots spreading through the interior of the cactus, sucking moisture without remorse.

If you can stand it, here is a close-up, click on the image to enlarge it.

It turns the stomach.

There have been many delays and distractions for the Stacked Toad Effigy Teapot: computer failure and restoration, other deadlines, and Thanksgiving, including a tragic Saguaro Plunge, details to be posted later.

But here is the next phase: the “lid” of the “teapot” is in place, and also the “finial” (knob), with Hector Halfsquid for scale.

This involved the addition of more toads — the final toads — to represent the top of the “teapot”.  The visual theme is toads-upon-toads, stacks of toads, piles of toads.  During the Couch’s spadefootlet episode, I was reminded of the toadly practice of Climbing On Your Neighbors.  When kept in captivity in large numbers, toads (and other amphibians and reptiles) will climb on each other with no regard for personal space, or any politeness at all.  I wanted to capture this “toe-in-the-eye” sense of physical involvement in the Toad Stack.  So on went two more toads, atop the base grouping of four toads.  Despite more than a week having elapsed this was not a problem, because even in the desert clay can be kept workable if enough dry-cleaners’ plastic and moist towels are employed. On the right is a shot of damp paper towels swathing the heads of the toads; they will need to be textured at some point, and if they’re too hard, it won’t work and the moist towels keeps the clay pliable and soft enough to receive an impression.

The effect of the two new toads, striving against each other on top of the pile, was what I wanted, but they needed a focal point — a flying insect they’re both trying to swallow.  This was the finial, or knob, of the “teapot” “lid”:

At this point, I always feel a piece is almost finished: the basic elements are sculpted and in place, there are at the moment no structural crises to solve.  But it’s far from the truth: a lot still remains to be done — texturing, refining shape detail (toes!), cleaning up stray clay bits and meaningless marks, applying decorative slip, etc.  For instance, I’ve forgotten until now about parotoid glands, which will have to be added.  And, other time-consuming details like compound eyes on the flying prey item.  So stay tuned for the next post on the effigy teapot: Texturing the Toad.

(Potential Toe Count: 104; Actual Toe Count: 49 so far; current Biological Digit Deficit, 53%)

Increments so far:

Why is a toad not a frog?

You almost certainly know this, but a toad isn’t a frog.

If that came as a surprise, it’s time for a speedy round-up of amphibian facts:

In general: toads have dry warty skin, frogs have moist slick skin. Toads need little or no water except to breed; frogs are usually amphibious. Toads have large kidney-shaped swellings behind each eye called parotoid glands; frogs have round hearing-related structures called tympani behind each eye. Most people think toads are gross but frogs are cute. That isn’t science; it’s just bad taste. Frogs croak, but many toads like  Woodhouse’s toads have beautiful muscial trills. ( If you were a Woodhouse’s toad, you’d think that was beautiful…) Toads have stout compact bodies with short legs for hopping; frogs are often svelte and long-legged for leaping.  Most frogs have webbed feet, most toads are not or only partially web-footed.  Frogs are more inclined to climb; toads are more inclined to dig.  Both can secrete irritating or even poisonous compounds that deter predators.

To the right above is a photo of a Ramsey Canyon Leopard Frog being aquatic.  Contrast it with the photo below it, a tropical toad from Belize. (photos, A. Shock)

In fact, these distinctions are generalizations and don’t hold true for every frog or toad. For more detail, I recommend the Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness book Amphibian, by Dr. Barry Clarke.  It’s meant for kids, but it’s really all anyone but a real herpetologist needs to get the gist of of toads, frogs, and caecilians.

Meet Miss Thang.  She is a female Costa’s hummingbird (Calypte costae), and unlike her purple-mustachioed male counterpart, she’s a plain green-gray above, and a plain gray-white below, with a chunky round body, almost no tail, and no neck at all.  She holds territory right outside our front door, as Queen of the Desert Garden.  The garden has many attributes valuable to a hummer: twiggy mesquites for roosting, a many-pointed DeSmet agave for perching, chuparosas with long-season blooms to feed upon, a freebie sugar-water feeder under the porch, and best of all, prime position from which to attract a showy male Costa’s who does looping, zizzing display flights for her each morning.  Although Miss Thang’s appearance is subdued, her personality isn’t.  She holds this valuable, resource-rich territory against all comers, including resident male Anna’s who are both brash and bigger, the summer tourists like Black-chinned hummingbirds, and any other hummers who may try to kype a slurp from the feeder.  The Gila woodpeckers are too big to chase off, and the Verdins seem to come and go with impunity, but other hummers at the feeder are given short shrift.  Speedy tail chases through the mesquite are frequent, although peevish scolding from a perch sometimes inches above the ground are often sufficient to rout invaders.  Her favorite perch from which to keep an eye on her real estate is a devil’s claw and obsidian wind chime, situated under the porch overhang directly outside the front door, shaded in the mid-day warmth, and dry in the rain.  At this time of year, when the door is open most of the day, we can see her perched alertly on the point of the devil’s claw for hours, spinning slowly as the chime turns in the breeze, chattering indignantly when another hummer flies through, or sallying forth to escort strangers right out of the yard.

Costa’s are desert hummingbirds.  They range from southern California, across the low deserts of Arizona, into Mexico.  The sources I’ve checked supply varying info about the yearly movements of Costa’s, giving an impression of the need for more research.  Some experts report they winter just south of our border with Mexico, others say the birds stay year-round in the low desert, some that they winter in the ‘burbs and breed in the less developed areas of the deserts; others just assert that their distribution is not well known.  In our yard in some years, Costa’s seem to be present in each month, with the largest number of individuals observed between June and December.  Some years they seem to disappear around the New Year and are scarce until late spring.  Now that we’ve packed the yard with hummer-friendly flowers (the photo above is Miss Thang’s demesne in full spring bloom) like chuparosa (Justicia californica), Mexican honeysuckle, (Justicia spicigera), Fairy dusters (Calliandra spp.), Desert lavender (Hyptis emoryi), native penstemons, various aloes, and sugar-water feeders, we seem to see more birds more of the year.

There’s been a female Costa’s hummer holding our front-garden territory year-round for at least two years.  We have no way of knowing for sure that it’s always Miss Thang, but of course it’s possible — it even seems likely.  We suspect she nests nearby — I’ve seen her gathering spider-webs in her beak — but have never discovered a nest. (Each year we do see young-of-the-year Costa’s in the yard, but we don’t know where they hatched.)

The yard also hosts glorious males, staking out other food-plant and feeder-related territories.  In past years, a Little-leaf Palo Verde was favored by a bird we called “Cornerhead” because his gorget went from scraggly sideburns to full-blown Yosemite Sam whiskers over the summer into fall. This is his picture on the right.  This year, there’s a long-mustached male (it may be Miss Thang’s suitor) under the pine/palo verde complex shading an outdoor table.  He “sings” (an almost inaudibly high-pitched descending sibilance) and gnats under the branches, keeping interlopers off the feeder there, then withdraws to the thorny interior of a nearby lemon in the middle of the day.  He “sings” from there, too, invisibly in the deep shade which is the only reason we know he’s in there.

Etymology…

…of the scientific name of Costa’s hummingbird, Calypte costae, is less than satisfying.  On the genus, Calypte, Choate, in the Dictionary of American Bird Names, can’t do any better than “Greek, a proper name of unknown significance”.  If he were alive, Gould could probably give a better explanation as to why he chose this genus for the bold Anna’s and Costa’s hummers.  I would suggest that Gould had in mind the adjective καλυπτή, from the verb καλύπτειν, to cover (with a thing).  The adjective means “enfolding”, connoting a veiled or mantled quality, possibly referring to the gorget that covers the entire crown and throat of hummers in this genus.  As for the species, costae, that was given in honor of Louis Marie Pantaleon Costa, Marquis de Beau-Regard, which early 19th century French nobleman had an “imposing” collection of deceased hummingbird specimens.  Merde, alors.

Photos: All photos by A. Shock, Three Star Owl.  The odd quality of the first photo of Miss Thang is due to the image being shot through an old-fashioned heavy metal security screen.

Here is an image of a Costa’s hummingbird mug from Three Star Owl.  The interior is a beautiful rich mulberry, the glaze color I can manage closest to the color of a male Costa’s gorget.

Saturday morning while walking through our neighborhood to the Park, E and I saw one of the local Gray Foxes. We didn’t have a camera! Too bad; it posed obligingly and let us admire it for quite a while: a beautiful, delicate zorro with a most magnificent tail.  It looked just like this:

Photo of Gray Fox by Patti McNeal

Desert Gray Foxes are quite arboreal: we frequently see them up mesquite trees and running along the tops of the block walls that criss-cross our neighborhood. They jump-climb the 6-foot walls easily, and also use them for somewhat coyote-proof napping eyries. Gray foxes rely on their subtle coloration to den out in the open — when they kip they coil up so that none of their black details show, enabling them, like owls, to hide in plain sight. The very first gray fox I ever saw was on a road embankment by the Mississippi River north of St. Louis: the fox was curled nearly invisibly in the thin winter grasses, right on the dirt about at eye level. As we drove past it on a gravel road it barely raised its head to look at us, but the movement revealed its dark eyes and “tear-lines”. If it hadn’t we never would have seen it.

I borrowed the photo above by Patti McNeal, who found this animal in Terlingua Texas. I’ve never managed a photo of a fox that’s any good, although I have been to Terlingua TX. Just for local interest, to the right is a photo I took, blurred and hard to see, of one of our local Grays napping on a neighbor’s wall in the dusk.

Etymology

Foxes are canids, but not Canis, the genus of dogs, wolves, coyotes, and jackals. The Gray fox has its own genus: Urocyon, which is from Greek ὀυρά, tail, and κύων, dog. Its species is cinereoargenteus, from Latin cinis, ash, plus L. argenteus, of silver. Put them together, and its name means “silvery ashy-black dog-tail“. In case you’re wondering, the genus of the Red fox and other “true foxes” is Latin Vulpes, meaning “fox”, which does NOT give us our word “fox.” That is said to be derived through Old English from Old German fukh (the modern German word for fox is fuchs), derived from the Proto-Indo-European root puk- which means “tail.”

Terlingua Texas in 1936, NPS photo by George A. Grant

…with a guest appearance by Charles Darwin

Marine iguana hands, Galápagos Islands. Photo E. Shock.

Pentadactyly, from Greek πέντε “five” plus δάκτυλος “finger”, is the condition of having five digits on each limb.

I make a lot of TOES. Gila monster toes. Crane toes. Jaguar toes. Hummingbird toes, owl toes, and roadrunner toes. Toad toes. A lot of TOES.

For the last week, I’ve been detailing Horned Lizard effigy bowls. This involves rendering a lot of small features like scales, horns, cloacal slits, pineal glands, and TOES. So it takes a long time, and that length of time is repeated for each horned lizard bowl, leaving plenty of opportunity for wistful thought about such subjects as, how can I finesse five toes on each tiny, fragile, rapidly hardening clay foot, and would anyone notice if there were only four?

“What could be more curious than that the hand of man formed for grasping, that of a mole, for digging, the leg of a horse, the paddle of a porpoise and the wing of a bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern and should include similar bones and in the same relative positions?” –Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

Okay, so Charles Darwin would notice. Darwin suggested pentadactyly was strong evidence in support of evolution. So, five digits is significant. A horned lizard has five digits on each limb, just like us, and just like many other animals, whether they are lizards, bats, or whales. With some exasperation, I realized I had no idea why this was — why five?

Needing a break from TOES, I headed to the computer: this is what the Internet is for. A quick search on the web produced the slick answer that we all have five digits because the ancestor of all tetrapods (four-limbed organisms) had five digits, and any modern organism that doesn’t (snakes, horses, most birds, etc) has lost digits through evolution. Well, alright so far as it goes — although it’s more of a description than an explanation — but why didn’t the ancestral tetrapod have 8 digits, or 4, or some other number?

It turns out they did: 8, and 6 and 7, among others. In the last few decades, paleontologists have found some fascinating tetrapod ancestors with a variety of phalangic arrangement probably related to the shift from fins to feet, at least partially connected with the shift from aquatic life to life on solid land. Does all this sound inconclusive? That’s because the significance of “Why Five?” is still being manhandled, pinched and slapped around with the discovery of each new ancient tetrapod, mostly in the North Atlantic land areas like Greenland and Scandinavia, which used to be swampy and warm, prime habitat for critters who wallowed in and out of muddy shallows on iffy substraits. Think Muddy Mudskipper, but Big, and with weird feet. Lots has been written about this, if you crave more detail than can be supplied here, check out an older but seminal essay by Stephen Jay Gould, “Eight (or Fewer) Little Piggies” and Jenny Clack’s website. She’s a professor at Cambridge University in the UK, and seems to be the reigning Queen of Early Tetrapod Research Especially As It Relates to Limb Development. (The image above of Acanthostega is from her site.)

Which brings me back to toad TOES (regular toad, not horned “toad”). As sometimes happens while riffling though the internet, I didn’t find an exact answer to my original question. But a lot of useful info accrued along the way. Like, now I know something I’d had a hard time finding out from pictorial sources, and forgot to count on the Couch’s spadefootlets: how many toes does a toad sport on its front feet? The answer is four (five on the back feet, the opposite of cats), and the next time I make a toad, I’ll have the right number. And be thankful, because it could have been eight.

A couple of mornings ago, we saw our first Cooper’s hawk of the season, swooping nimbly around the big backyard mesquite in an unsuccessful attempt at snagging a dove or finch from the feeders under the tree. It lit on the utility pole in the alley and, having an itchy face, primly scratched itself with a big, bird-catching foot.

Cooper’s hawks (Accipiter cooperii) are accipiters, a group of bird-eating hawk species characterized by medium to small size, spry flight (the better to capture other birds with), short rounded wings and a long tail useful for steering in flight. They inhabit a broad geographic area primarily in the lower 48 states, and a wide range of habitats, including temperate woodland, mesquite bosques, cottonwood stream-sides, as well as neighborhoods and parks. Cooper’s hawks are the most frequently encountered accipiter in Arizona.

If you put out a bird feeder for songbirds, you’re also feeding Cooper’s hawks (and their smaller relative, the Sharp-shinned hawk). Not because they eat seed, of course, but because they eat seed-eaters, like the finches and sparrows that stuff themselves at well-stocked feeders. Our yard hosts Cooper’s hawks most often during migration and in winter, when they lurk inconspicuously in the lower branches of trees, waiting for unaware prey to come within range. All accipiters are capable of tail-chasing smaller birds skilfully through foliage, and take prey either on the ground or in mid-air (see fierce foot above). It’s not uncommon for us to find a Cooper’s hawk under the canopy of the big mesquite on a chilly winter morning with breakfast in its fist, or a feather pool on the ground under where one has roosted and plucked its meal. They favor avian prey, but will take anything they can get, including rodents, invertebrates, reptiles, etc.

Although the strong early morning light in the upper photograph makes it difficult to see, the reddish barring on our recent hawk’s breast and belly means it’s an adult; an immature would have brown dots and streaks instead. Its gray back shows it’s a male; the larger females are brownish above. Cooper’s have fierce red eyes and beetling brows, which give them a “You talkin’ to me?” sort of look.

Photos: top, E. Shock. Right: a very clear photo of an adult Cooper’s from T. Beth Kinsey’s Firefly Forest showing an excellent assortment of field-marks for the species: contrasting dark cap, red barred breast, bright yellow legs and barred tail with relatively wide white terminal band.

Etymology

In Latin, accipiter means “hawk”, from the verb accipere, which means “to take” as in “taking prey”, like the word “raptor”. The species name, cooperii, is named after ornithologist William C. Cooper (1798-1864), a New York scientist who described the Evening Grosbeak.  In places where their ranges overlap, such as northern Arizona and New Mexico, a Cooper’s hawk would love to eat an Evening grosbeak.