Amberglen Farm: Happy Hour with a Hawk

So, even though it's been cold and slightly rainy, I was jonesing for some farm time. I just have to be outside every day, even if it's wintery weather. So I headed to the farm with a jug and a knitting project. When I first got there, for some reason I was looking in the thicket, and noticed another dead rat. Like the first one I found a couple of weeks ago, this one had its throat slashed as if by clippers. Again I suspected a hawk kill, but the ratty carcass was tucked in the thicket, and that's not where you'd expect a hawk to feed.

Then Bud came out to join me, and we started chatting. We wandered over to the playhouse, and then I looked up at the tree over the washhouse, and saw this hawk.

It was perched there, watching us. We hung out and it flew closer and closer, and it finally hopped onto the chair and then went down into the thicket. It grabbed the rat and started eating it. We could clearly see it happily standing on the rat, tearing bits off.

All I had was my phone in my pocket, so these pics aren't that good. Anyway, once the hawk had gone into the thicket, Buddy and I slowly walked back to the table. We drank our beers, and the hawk feasted on his rat, in a companionable manner for quite some time, until a noise startled him and he flew away.

Later, just as we were about to give up and go home for the night, Catherine came over, and we told her about it, and decided to have one more beer...

So this morning, I'm trying to identify the hawk. It's rough because I have two candidates. To my mind, our hawk looks like a Cooper's Hawk. Compare the tail of our guy above to this image of a Cooper's Hawk.

At first I thought it might be a Northern Harrier, which nests on the ground, perches low, and eats rodents. But Northern Harriers have a white rump patch, and our guy does not.

Another hawk that looks very much like a Cooper's is the Sharp Shinned Hawk. These links below list both Cooper's and Sharp Shinned Hawks as mostly eating birds, but other sites say they eat rodents too. Our guy was definitely eating his rodent. This is a Sharp Shinned.