I don’t know about you, but I’m seldom prepared when a young hawk decides to land less than 10 feet away. This has only happened once before, but I was more traumatized this time, because I’m supposed to know a little about taking pictures now.

Luckily, the hawk was in no hurry, and is possibly too young to be as skittish as it should be. There was, however, the dusty screen, and the fear that it would fly away before I was able to get some shots.

I do have a theory about the hawk’s interest in the deer scare. For a few days now, it hasn’t been functioning right. The water dripped off to one side, missing the reservoir in the center. It made a low humming noise. Perhaps it seemed to be alive and in distress. The hawk checked it out very thoroughly, observed the water, walked back and forth on the rim of the pot, and seemed to be having a fine time just fooling around. It occurred to me to get a handful of feeder mice one day to entice it back.

Which kind of hawk was it? The Sharp-shinned juvenile is very similar to the Cooper’s. I generally turn to the pros when I have such a quandary, and this time, Jill at the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory came through with a detailed explanation.

According to Jill, it’s a Cooper’s. This time of year, juveniles are frequently seen, she says. Sharp-shins have a smaller head, Cooper’s have a fiercer look. On a Cooper’s the tail is more rounded, while the Sharp-shins’ looks more square. I was confused by the brown streaks on the front. The Sharp-shins’ are described in Sibleys as being coarse, the Cooper’s thin. They looked coarse to me, but I know very little about the finer points.