It’s tough, but circle of life must continue
SOME of you will love nature and enjoy watching those corking wildlife programmes on the TV, or laptop, or phone.
Others have told me that they don’t like watching them, because “fings get killed.”
Well that’s life, my friends.
If you see a bird of prey killing a small bird or mammal, your instinct might be to rush over and stop it. Just think about that. What you are actually doing is stopping that raptor feeding itself or its family.
I’ve even seen people stopping spiders catching flies, then complaining about the flies. It’s tough. I have told you on numerous occasions about the starlings being real characters in my garden.
Well another character comes along every so often, a sparrowhawk, and takes some of the less street-savvy starlings for its dinner.
It is distressing to see feathers on the floor or to hear the victims in distress for a couple of seconds, but there is something quite awesome about watching the sparrowhawk tearing the feathers off the dead bird.
This is what nature is all about and sparrowhawks are amazingly agile predators.
Watching them swoop into a garden, manoeuvring around tight spots, is amazing.
Our garden is a smallish square, with a dog-leg for the bird table.
Yet this bird of prey can get in an out with a sparrow, tit or starling without any trouble.
It is then happy to sit on the wall and finish off its meal, or just take in the sun.
We are so lucky when it just sits there and eyes us up as we are washing the dishes.
Thank goodness I am not 100 times smaller.
The sparrowhawk is one of our smallest birds of prey, the male being somewhere between a blackbird and a collared dove in size, so hopefully they are fairly safe.
The female is larger, up to the size of a feral pigeon.
Sparrowhawks will ambush their prey from a perch, while other times they may fly low, suddenly changing direction to fool it.
We have a back alley with plenty of cover, so it’s perfect hawk hunting here.
With rounded wings and a relatively long, narrow tail, males are small with a blue-grey back and white underparts showing reddish-orange barring.
Females are much larger, with browner plumage above and grey bars below.
They both have reddish cheeks.
It is amazing when people call us to ask about a bird they have seen in their back garden and nine times out of 10 it will be a sparrowhawk.
In the countryside, sparrowhawks were devastated by insecticide use, but recently there has been an increase in these fabulous birds.
And I am pretty certain starling numbers are starting to recover this year, with more than two dozen regularly rocking my bird table.
So the circle of life must continue and, as wildlife recovers, there is a better chance that you will see some of those spectacular natural events by looking out of your window.