Quite the talent ... reading with one eye and keeping the other eye peeled for birds. Your Cooper's hawk on an isolated perch backed by a white sky is certainly more engaging than my shot under similar conditions. When one employs more millimeters to do the job, (600mm vs 300mm) one gets more fetching detail (4 x as many pixels on the subject). You compensated well for the bright sky, I'm assuming, or is it just a matter of center-weighted metering. That's what my camera is set to do but at the distance my Cooper's was perched that setting was overwhelmed. BTW, the hawk never returned. Now that it is so cold I won't be sitting outside anymore, so even if it did make an appearance I'd be unaware of it.
