Square Meals: Cooper’s hawk snacks in downtown Bloomington

For a couple hours Saturday morning, a winged creature as big as maybe five robins smooshed together into a single bird perched on a branch outside the window of The Square Beacon’s headquarters on 6th Street in downtown Bloomington.

Even though its leaves have been dropped for the season, the city of Bloomington’s tree inventory makes the tree easy to identify as a littleleaf linden.

The bird was identified by reliable sources on internet social media as a Cooper’s hawk.

After a while, the hawk began feeding on what looked like a small songbird it had brought along as a snack.

If the hawk had chosen a tree just a half block west, where the streets make a regular four-sided polygon around the county courthouse, the songbird could have counted as a square meal.

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