Facinating accipiter! When I look at the first two photos, I'm pretty sure that I'm looking at a perched Cooper's Hawk. The tail looks substantial, long and properly graduated, the thin streaking and lack of flank barring looks good for Coopers, the bill looks properly substantial. The head and neck do look smallish, but this is more than offset by the quite pale and yellow iris. Per Brian Wheeler in "Raptors of Western North America", a Sharp-shinned will have an orange or yellow-orange iris by this time of year (rarely pale yellow), while a Cooper will still retain a paler iris.
Then the bird is in flight in the third photo, and my perceptions get turned upside down. The tail abruptly looks too short, and more importantly -- pinched in at the base, a Sharpy characteristic that we shouldn't see on a Coop. The wings look broad, and carried slightly forward rather than flat, the body looks stubby, the head appears small -- and these are all Sharpie characteristics as discussed by Jerry Liguori in "Hawks From Every Angle". Offsetting the iris color is a trailing band to the flight feathers that is palish and quite brown, lacking the
"crisply sharply defined, crisp dark gray or black band on the trailing edge of the remiges of the underwing" that Wheeler judges worthy of emphasizing with italics in his ID discussion of juvenile Coops.
And then of course, graduated tails can be seen on some female Sharpies, and thinly streaked underside markings are also characteristic of some lightly marked Sharpies.
In sorting these out, I think that I am more likely to be confused by an odd angle, lighting and color on the in-flight bird than the perched photos, and therefore have a Coop lean on this bird. I suspect that having a graduated tail, light markings and pale yellow iris in late March all on the same Sharpie would be quite unlikely (even if each individual characteristic is possible). That said, I don't have much confidence in that lean, the third photo removed that...
