IN THE AFTERNOON…
As we’re spending more time watching our gardens, we’re very likely to witness one of the most dashing killers of the bird world at work. Tim Dee introduces a master of ambush: the sparrowhawk
You will have seen this or know someone who has. There – on the back lawn of your house, or in a neighbour’s driveway, or on the pavement down towards the local shop, or under the big trees by the pond in the park – it was there, suddenly noticed, unexpectedly close, a bird of prey standing on another bird, hungrily gazing down at the upturned breast beneath it like a victorious fighter on a vanquished body, a pocket-sized carnivore caught in the middle of its murderous business. Just there, such shockingly wild life so close to home!
The bird on top is a sparrowhawk. Sometimes the underling can be twice the size of the raptor trying to eat it. It is like watching David fight Goliath – victory isn’t guaranteed. But the hawk’s thrillingly cold eyes imply that it will prevail.
“The sparrowhawk mantles its quarry, spreading its grey wings like a sinister cloak”
On half a dozen occasions in 50 birdwatching years I have witnessed such protracted slayings; each time, I’ve had the sensation of intruding on a malevolent hypnosis or a very unhappy seance. The hawk appears to be trying to psych up its prey to death.
The male sparrowhawk I saw one afternoon last winter, trying to finish off a wood pigeon in the middle of the road outside my home in Bristol, was not much bigger than a thrush, but, along with its mustard-yellow eyes, it had a bone-bright beak and long, strong, scaly legs. All spoke of the hawk’s tenacity: it would out-stare what was beneath it and hang on to its dinner like grim death. And as it lowered its beak towards the breast of the dumbstruck pigeon, I could also see its talons clawing through the more than ruffled feathers of its prey. That prey, it was horrible to realise, was a bird still alive: a wood pigeon that day, or, on other occasions, a town pigeon, or the male blackbird of what was – no! – half of the pair in my garden, or a great-spotted woodpecker aghast at being pinned to a lawn, or a starling screaming back at those killer eyes and that beak so keen to begin eating.
It’s like stumbling into quite the wrong film at the multiplex. The sparrowhawk mantles its quarry, spreading its grey wings like a sinister cloak. Lowering its beak, it plucks at breast feathers, searching through them for edible material. It tears out a bite-sized bloody fillet and, while the starling screams again or the wood pigeon forlornly windmills its wings, the hawk begins to eat, happy with its meat very rare, not caring that the donor of the cut is still alive and kicking.
BACK-GARDEN BLOODLETTING
Such gore in our domestic precincts is certainly an eye-opener, and today we are seeing it more and more. Sparrowhawks are absent from only the most mountainous areas of
Britain and are now more widespread and common than they have been for centuries. There are 35,000 breeding pairs. Wherever you live, there will be a sparrowhawk nearby.
The species started out as forest birds, feeding in clearings and at woodland fringes. Now they have found those rich ecotones (there is commonly more life at the edges of habitats than at their heart) are amply replicated in town gardens and city parks. And, because they are occupying built-up areas like never before, many of us town and city-dwelling citizens will have had opportunities to observe a sparrowhawk neighbour on the hunt or enforcing a lockdown with its prey. It seems likely, too, that our recent confinement to our homes
will have increased such encounters. Sparrowhawks feed almost entirely on birds. Most other British raptors are not so bird-obsessed. We are familiar with their hunting techniques: kestrels hover (scanning for small mammals); buzzards soar (as well as plodding after earthworms and eating roadkill); red kites wheel and dip (in back gardens too, though not often for living food). Sparrowhawks are more furtive. Kitted out with relatively short and rounded wings, ambush is their métier: secrecy and stealth and surprise.
With visual acuity as much as eight times that of humans and unusually keen perception of distance and movement, sparrowhawks can operate in tight corners in ways that amaze anyone lucky enough to catch a glimpse of an attack. They flummox our sight as much as they fluster anything that they pursue. They hedge-hop and hug the ground, they appear able to fly, at speed, through trees, and they literally burst from within bushes.
CONVENIENCE FOOD
Having moved into places built and fashioned by humans, the hawks have headed for the greatest concentration of bird-prey: garden birdtables. Today, the word has taken on a new meaning: for sparrowhawks, feeding stations are sushi counters or meat smorgasbords or butcher’s blocks. Great tits, chaffinches, starlings, blackbirds – all are commonly snatched from their own dining to become a hawk takeaway. Sparrowhawks will also tackle larger portions, pigeons especially. And, happy to live by their name, they are also fond of sparrow. Or they were, before the British house sparrow population crashed.
On that sad subject, the sparrowhawk has been accused of the mass-murder of small birds. There is no evidence to support such a belief (see box, right), which is most likely a prejudice left over from the era of intensive gamekeeping in the countryside. However, most observers, me included, would agree that sparrowhawks do have an air of being particularly hungry hunters. They will even eat one another: males, which are always smaller and regularly half the size of females (for evolutionarily useful reasons of dividing nesting and chick-rearing duties and diversifying food sources), have been seen killed and eaten by their very own breeding partners.
A hawk’s gotta hunt though, and no bird of prey lives the life of a predator and defines that word so vividly as a sparrowhawk. Look out for one today – they’ll be on the prowl close by. I saw one just yesterday; my local supermarket attracts a flutter of pigeons to its roof and at least once a day these birds are freaked into a headache of anxious flight when a female sparrowhawk passes. She looks to me like nothing more than a smudge at the edge of the sky, but the pigeons, doing their best to look over their shoulders as they fly, know better. That smudge is picking up speed, intent on murder.