THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 5, 1995 TAG: 9508040033
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
Telling Cooper's hawks from their smaller kin, the sharp-shinned hawks, made for a curious bit of long-ago county-clerk lore, a scrap of history picked up and recorded by Milnor Ljungstedt in a collection she called The County Court Notebook.
When I ran across the old book in a local library, the mention of the two similar species took me back a few years. For I once witnessed the netting of individual birds of both kinds, both fiercely beautiful, during a hawk watch near Kiptopeke on the Eastern Shore. Close up, it was quite easy to distinguish the larger Cooper's from its cousin, while they were being fitted with leg bands preparatory to release.
Though the Ljungstedt book was published in Bethesda, Md., her hawk tale, from a time when wildlife was treated more callously than now, had a Virginia county-seat setting.
It seems someone had sent in the heads (apparently to claim bounties in the era before all such birds of prey came under the law's protection) of five hawks known to be either Cooper's or sharp-shinned. But, lacking precise identification, the county clerk expressed a worry to the board of supervisors:
``The law says that you must say just how many Cooper's hawks and how many sharp-shinned hawks. Do any of you gentlemen know one from the other?''
Since no one on hand seemed to, one supervisor suggested: ``Why not say three Cooper's hawks and two sharp-shinned?''
But the clerk continued to balk: ``You've got to know 'em.''
The upshot: Somebody there said a man named Jones who would know, so Jones was sent for. When he came, he promptly proclaimed, ``Two Cooper's hawks, three sharp-shinned.'' And that's the way the final entry on the account book read. The guess hadn't been far off.
From this incident, we can conclude at least this much: Despite the substantial difference in the sizes of the two species and some other distinctions which experts like Jones would know about, most of the people at that supervisors' meeting - in those old days of war between farmers and hawks - didn't think or care much about the differences. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB