ODD COOPER'S HAWK VOCALIZATION

I'm back home in the snow and ice for two weeks now and finally getting out to do some birding. Today I had an interesting encounter with a rather tame immature Cooper's Hawk. Because of the large size this bird was almost certainly a female.

Here are some digiscoped images of this bird taken through my Kowa TS 883.







What attracted me to this bird was the repeated almost meow like vocalization it was producing. It repeated this call in bouts of about five to eight calls a second or two apart. These bouts were repeated every one to two minutes for nearly an hour! If it had been late summer or the fall I would have thought it was a food begging call, but really not sure what was going on in late February! If you click on the video link below you can hear a few of these calls in the clip. If anyone is familiar with this call, I'd appreciate you dropping me a line at peleetom@netcore.ca