Polk County Record

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On last Saturday morning's bird walk with the Village Birders of the Dallas Retirement Village we had a "once in a life-time" viewing experience.  We were birding in the Dallas City Park, when Carolyn Wall, noticed a big hawk sized bird in a tree. As we zeroed in on the bird, I recognized it as possibly a Cooper's Hawk. And as we got a better view we realized that there were actually two birds, and then we saw the third one, and eventually a fourth bird, which was busy with short flights in the area.  Then it dawned on me that these were juvenile Cooper's Hawks.  Try as we might, we could not come up with an adult, which would be easy to identify because of the rust colored baring.  It became quite entertaining to watch the forth bird while it continued unsuccessfully trying to capture a squirrel. When I got home and was looking through information in eBird.org for Polk County,  I was surprised to find that our number of 4 Cooper's Hawks is the record High Count for Polk County.