Cooper's Hawk Nest on Peebles Island

I've been waiting for a chance to shoot both Bald Eagles on the nest without luck until this morning. I was only at the nest for about 15 minutes and viewed lots of activity. However, as I was taking the scenic route back to the parking lot, I saw a largish bird landing on a nest I hadn't noticed on a different part of the island.

The nest was partially back lit and there were a lot of small branches in the way. So autofocus was out and I had to manually focus on the nest. After seeing the silhouette of the bird, I had an initial guess of the identity but I couldn't tell for sure. Here are some shots of what I could see as I zoomed in on the photos on my camera.

There were two adults coming off and on the nest every minute or so and luckily one decided to pose on a tree branch near where where I was standing. It's nice when birds cooperate like this. Here are two uncropped shots of the Cooper's Hawk followed by 100% crops of the head.

The shots of the Bald Eagle pair on the nest will come later or tomorrow.