One reason I'm so bad at birdwatching is that I really am not very good at judging sizes (or distances). What I ended up doing was looking for sites to tell me which hawklike birds are likely to be seen in Maryland this time of year, then looking at photos of them to try to narrow things down. Fortunately, the hawk took long enough eating its meal for me to visit lots of different websites while it was here. Since this bird was definitely large enough to enjoy a squirrel dinner, I'll take your word on the identification!

It was certainly a beautiful bird.