I’ve been traveling to a location recently looking for wildlife along the Salt River in the Tonto National Forest in Arizona. A lot of people come hear looking for the wild horses that roam along the Salt River and the Bush Highway. My goal is to find whatever roams this narrow corridor along the river and desert trails.
Deep on a trail I happened to hear the cry of something unfamiliar. I was hoping it wasn’t the skunk I smelled earlier and slowly walked towards the call to find a couple Cooper’s Hawks perched above the trail.
Arizona is home to several raptors and guessing this is a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk based on images from AllAboutBird’s.org.
I’m not sure what it was eating, but it seemed to be another predator with a full belly. Momma hit the jackpot. She didn’t stick around for the photo session unfortunately. I attempted to zoom in to see what it was ripping apart. In this instance it looks like feathers are being discarded.
This young bird didn’t seem to mind the shutter and kept working on it’s meal. In this image it appears it has a fish head. Although I saw other parts and pieces that resembled reptile legs with feet.
In the three images above the juvenile Cooper’s Hawk takes a break from it’s meal to check out the camera. The last one a hard stare at the shadow clicking away below.
Now the meal is devoured, it’s time to clean up as the young Hawk looks for any left overs and brushes it’s beak on a twig.
The juvenile Cooper’s Hawk takes one last look back over their shoulder before taking flight. I thanked it for a one in a million opportunity to see this activity in the wild.
