I mistakenly called it a falcon in my humorous tweet this afternoon:

Just saw a falcon snatch a pigeon out of the air and then land and leave it on someone's porch. Amazon's newest delivery experiment?

— Fuzzy Gerdes (@fuzzy) February 13, 2014

But a zoomed in look at one of the photos I snapped with my phone shows the what look to me like the tail bands of a Cooper’s hawk:

And I didn’t actually see the mid-air snatch (it’s sometimes hard to have journalistic accuracy in a tweet), but the hawk flew over my head in a big flutter, carrying something, and then landed on a neighbor’s porch, paused a moment, and then flew up into a tree, leaving behind what I was then able to see was a pigeon.

I hope it wasn’t me being interested in what was going on that scared it away. I snapped a couple shots of the hawk in the tree and then went about my errands. On my way home, the pigeon was gone—hopefully into the hawk’s belly and not discovered by a surprised homeowner.