Month: February 2025

Cooper’s hawk. Astur cooperii.

February 16, 2025 — Leave a comment

One of my favorite North American birds of prey to watch or illustrate due to their tenacity and ferocity while hunting.  

A Cooper’s Hawk catches small and medium size birds with its feet and kills it by repeated squeezing. Cooper’s Hawks hold their catch away from the body until it dies. They’ve even been documented drowning their prey, holding it underwater until it stops moving.

This bird was recently reclassified from the Accipiter genus to Astur. Grouped with the American Goshawk (Astur atricapillus). This was all brought to be from new genetic research and published last year. 

I hand built this panel in my garage and arranged the composition using pencil and acrylic paint and also acrylic paint markers.

Thank you for looking at birds with me.

Raptor snapshots from the field.

February 4, 2025 — Leave a comment

It has been a very great personal journey to learn to paint all the birds I’ve shared here. My journey began more than a decade ago here with learning to paint the Red-tailed Hawk. In the last year I’ve picked up a very basic spotting scope and have (with luck) been able to catch some reasonably decent photographs of those original favorite birds of mine. 

Here’s a series of photographs that I’ve taken in Illinois and California. 

And here’s a few of the Cooper’s hawks I’ve managed to snap a picture of in Illinois and South Carolina. 

And just a few other raptors I’ve spotted in Illinois and California. American kestrel, Bald Eagle, and Northern Harrier.