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1 May 2010 Comparative Morphology of Northern Populations of Breeding Cooper's Hawks
Robert N. Rosenfield, Laura J. Rosenfield, John Bielefeldt, Robert K. Murphy, Andrew C. Stewart, William E. Stout, Timothy G. Driscoll, Michael A. Bozek
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Abstract

Few studies at a broad geographical scale have characterized intraspecific variation in morphology of woodland hawks in the genus Accipiter. From 1999 to 2007 we investigated morphological variation in large samples of live Cooper's Hawks (A. cooperii) nesting in four study areas: coniferous woodland around Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, isolated deciduous woodlands in short-grass prairies of northwestern North Dakota, towns and rural deciduous woodlands along the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, and urban and rural mixed deciduous and coniferous landscapes of Wisconsin. These sites span 2660 km across the northern part of the species' breeding range. We measured body mass (i.e., size), wing chord, tail length, tarsus diameter, hallux length, and culmen length of breeding adults, finding significant and clinal variation in body mass (or size). The smallest and most similar-sized birds occurred in British Columbia and western North Dakota, larger birds along the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, and the largest birds in Wisconsin. Several other characters varied significantly when mass was used as a covariate. Variation by study site in mean indices of sexual size dimorphism was negligible and not significant. We speculate that the morphological differences we found, in part, are the result of geographic isolation, where diets, migratory behavior, and structural characteristics of nesting habitats vary across landscape types.

© 2010 by The Cooper Ornithological Society, All rights reserved, Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp.
Robert N. Rosenfield, Laura J. Rosenfield, John Bielefeldt, Robert K. Murphy, Andrew C. Stewart, William E. Stout, Timothy G. Driscoll, and Michael A. Bozek "Comparative Morphology of Northern Populations of Breeding Cooper's Hawks," The Condor 112(2), 347-355, (1 May 2010). https://doi.org/10.1525/cond.2010.090148
Received: 3 August 2009; Accepted: 1 November 2009; Published: 1 May 2010
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