This bird is almost certainly an immature (hatched in spring of '05) red-tailed hawk.

Cooper's hawks almost never attempt to take a rabbit, as they are too big for a Cooper's to kill with any ease. Cooper's feed almost exclusively on birds.

An immature red-tail would be very interested in a caged rabbit. Immature's are also sometimes intriqued with the abundance of dickeybirds flitting around a feeder and the hawks are sometimes attracted to this mass of apparently available protein. But unless one of the birds has hit a window or otherwise handicapped itself, the songbirds are safe from the red-tail.

And if you have an aviary, with caged birds outside, that's an almost impossible-to-forget target for a red-tail. These hawks know that birds don't normally sit around in small spaces, unless they've been injured. The red-tail thinks that it might somehow take one of your caged birds.

Red-tails are North America's most successful large hawk for exactly what you are seeing here, an intelligent effort to take whatever prey appears to present itself. Red-tails most often consume voles. But if some other animal, the size of a rabbit or smaller, appears to be vulnerable, the red-tail will check it out, as your bird is doing.

Thanks John for the information. I do see three redtailed hawks about a 1/2 mile from my property flying over an open field and diving down. They are usually sitting on telephone poles along the road. They are beautiful to see. As suburbia pushes out they continually lose more habitat and hunting space. This particular bird doesn't show any fear, I can get quite close before he flies, and as I said he flew up behind me and landed very close. Is there anyway to deter him away from my cages, or do you think by spring he will be mature enough to be hunting in the open. I learned a great deal just reading this site, more than most sites so thank you for the education.

The landing of the bird near you is a bit of a concern. It shouldn't be doing this, although immatures sometimes have this inattention to external threats. This sort of thing is most often seen in hawks that have been kept illegally in captivity for a while, then released. They learn that humans aren't a real threat to them, so they hang around.

In the worst cases, these birds have learned that humans provide food, so they think some food might be forthcoming. Under no circumstances ever place out any meat for this hawk. It needs to learn -- as it will sooner or later -- that it should stay away from humans.

It also needs to learn to stay away from your aviary and bird feeder, too. But it's winter, and live, warm food is right there in full view, if not in full vulnerability. For a young hawk trying to make it through its first winter, this will prove to be an insurmountable attraction. The hawk may hang around all winter.

But when the days start getting noticeably longer in March, it will respond to ramping migratory urges and head north.

It would seem that as more and more of us buy and create rural homesites (as I did), red-tailed hawk populations ought to be threatened or declining from a lack of available habitat. But for this species (and for Cooper's hawks, too), this isn't the case. There are more red-tails alive today than probably at any other time.

In presettlement times, red-tails lived only on the open edges of the primal forest (in the East). As the Eastern and Midwestern forests were openned and converted to farmland, the red-tail population expanded. Red-tails can't live in an unbroken forest. They require open land.

But until the last ten or twenty years, red-tails were commonly shot or trapped in many rural areas, suppressing their populations. No longer. Very few are shot any more, and very few are trapped.

The greatest problem immature red-tails have is finding an open, unoccupied nesting territory. There are now so many adult, breeding red-tails that immatures rising to adulthood frequently can't find any open habitat in which to mate (form a pair bond), build a nest, and raise young.

In short, there is a housing shortage out there for red-tails. There are large numbers of experienced adults who have saturated the countryside. Your bird is not guarenteed of ever becoming a parent.

For this winter, though, it's having a glorious time watching your caged animals. The hawk is only an adolescent. In a year or so, it will grow up and attempt to attend to adult matters.