370 
COOPER'S HAWK. 
will unite with us in bearing testimony, and to whom only the 
author, on the eve of his departure for Europe, would have 
been willing to intrust the ultimate revision and superintend- 
ence of this work. 
The perfect accuracy with which Mr Lawson may be said 
to have outdone himself in the delineation of this bird, in all 
the details of its plumage, bill, and feet, will now at least have 
established the species in the most incontestable manner. 
Our bird agrees very well with the falcon gentle, Falco gen- 
tilis, Linne ; but as that species is referred to the young of 
the goshawk, we have preferred giving it a new name, to revi- 
ving one that might have created an erroneous supposition of 
identity. To the young goshawk, our hawk is, in fact, ex- 
tremely similar in colour and markings, being chiefly distin- 
guished from it by the characters of their respective sections, 
having the tarsi much more slender and elongated, and the 
wings still shorter ; the tail is also considerably more rounded. 
But it is to the sharp-shinned hawk {Falco velox) of Wilson, 
the Falco Pennsylvanicus, or Falco fuscus in its immature plu- 
mage, that our Cooper^s hawk bears the most striking resem- 
blance, and is in every particular most closely allied. Even 
comparing feather by feather, and spot by spot, they almost 
perfectly agree ; but the much larger size of the present, it 
being more than twice the bulk, will always prevent their 
being confounded, even by the most superficial observer. An- 
other good mark of discrimination may be found in the com- 
parative length of the primaries ; the second in F, Cooperii 
being subequal to the sixth, while in F. velox it is much shorter. 
The latter has also the fifth as long as the fourth ; that, in our 
species, being equal to the third. The tail is ulso much more 
rounded, the outer feather being nearly an inch shorter than 
the middle one. In F, velox the tail is even, the outer feather 
being as long, or, if any thing, longer than the middle. There 
is no other North American species for which it can be 
mistaken. 
