Lin - Thanks for your vote that my ID of the hawk is a Cooper's Hawk. I also looked at some juvenile red-shouldered hawk photos, and I was stumped. I do believe what I saw was a Cooper's instead of a young Red-shouldered, but I could be wrong. It has all the markings of a Cooper's. So .... I'm going to go with Cooper's unless someone comes along and proves me wrong with photo links and info.
I, too, love the bluejays! A large family of them live near me and are always in my backyard. The bird songs in my yard and around me are awesome all day long! I feel like I live out in the woods, not in a neighborhood!
I have a zoom lens on my camera, which is why I was able to get so many close-up shots of birds. Though the Sandhill Crane parents were VERY wary of me. They are very protective of their babies. So it is not safe to get too close to them. They have been known to chase off anything they perceive as a threat.
The saddest thing I came across was at the beginning of this school year. We have a mating Sandhill Crane pair that lives much of the time on our school property. No one knows what happened, but the PE teacher came out to the covered hardcourt area to set up before school started and found a dead juvenile sandhill crane. The parents were nearby just having a fit. There was blood everywhere. The baby was curled up (dead) and the parents were still very close by trying to protect it and wake it up. So sad. The baby's body was removed by a wildlife expert and they could not determine what attacked and killed it. The parents continued to come back to the spot constantly for over a month. And even now, 7 months later, they still can be seen walking near the spot the baby died as if looking for it. They mate for life and are such amazingly smart birds. Their family unit is the most important thing to them and they will fight to protect it.
