Small bird of prey identification please! (1 Viewer)

My sparrow family (about 40) sundenly making a hell of a noise today and when I got to the window I was greated by this beauty!

Can anyone tell me what it is please?

Sorry about the picture quality

Also, is it likely to hang around and dispense of other birds in the garden? As much as a treat seeing this bird was, I don't really want to lose the garden birds that my wife and I have spent ages tempting in!

Thanks in advance!

FruitSim said:

My sparrow family (about 40) sundenly making a hell of a noise today and when I got to the window I was greated by this beauty!

Can anyone tell me what it is please?

Sorry about the picture quality

Also, is it likely to hang around and dispense of other birds in the garden? As much as a treat seeing this bird was, I don't really want to lose the garden birds that my wife and I have spent ages tempting in!

Thanks in advance!

Click to expand...

its a female Sparrowhawk (or most probably a juvenile) and don't worry you'll get your sparrows back as soon as it disappears. They tend to have a hunting territory so it has probably flown over your garden quite a few times in the past.

Yep! Sparrowhawk. We have them as daily visitors - sometimes they succeed in a catch and sometimes not. The birds always come back as soon as they're gone. They do have big territories but once they've found a decent food source they'll keep coming back - but have never made much of an impact on visiting birds and we've had them around for several years now.

Many thanks!

Apologies for the bad spelling in title and thread

a very nice bird, although they do make a small dent in the garden bird population, pretty much most gardens will have a sparrowhawk that hunts in or around the area.

i have lost a few birds this year to the local sparrowhawks in my garden!

I'm quite speachless tonight, and my wife is almost in tears!

My favourite birds are the Kestrel and the sparrow lol. We have lots of birds of prey around here, but I've never seen one so close. It was stunning to be honest. So alert, staring at me. I imagine when I was looking through my binoculars at it, it was looking back at a better magnification lol. Brilliant.

Just such a shame it took out one of the sparrows!

My wife was gutted. I'm between a rock and a hard place lol. I want to see the hawk again, and hopefully to see it in action, but I don't want to see our garden birds as the target!

The most amazing thing I noticed during the whole incident was firstly the noise made by the sparrows when the attack happened. They didn't leave the area, instead they flew to the roof (a place they rarely go actually - they prefer the hedges). Then they screamed. literally, 30-40 of them all screaming.

The second, and most intriguing thing, was the return of the birds. Firstly, a chaffinch came down. But, rather than enter the garden, he spent about 30 mins sitting on the back wall observing. After about 20 mins, a dunnock appeared and sat on the shed roof (at the back of the garden again). Lastly, a single sparrow arrived and also sat watching for a while. It must have been 90 minutes before any bird actually returned into the garden to feed, even though they were all around, and plenty were flying around the gardens. Quite amazing, never seen anything like it!

I'm afraid that sparrowhawks are the "price" (not that I see it like that myself - they're fantastic birds, as you've noted) of our efforts to attract lots of small birds into the garden.

You can't really expect predators not to exploit the feast we've laid on for them, so you just need to accept them as part of the "bigger picture".

Quite true, not that there's any option if we didn't like it!

It'll take a few attacks for the wife to get used to it though. I think it's the fact that the bird was prepared to stay on the lawn and eat the sparrow with us gawking at the window lol.

I just hope it doesn't take something colourful infront of her, like the robin, great tit, or one of the finches!

Maybe it'll go for a pigeon and save me a tenner in food a week lol (just kidding, we love the pigeon too!)

...and don't forget that a healthy prey population (ie your House Sparrows) means survival for the predator. The number of prey species controls the number of predators, not the other way around.

Enjoy the spectacle!

Steve

I am starting to get used to my sparrowhawks. They take atleast 1 or 2 sparrows or starlings a week here and that is the ones that the wife or i see!
Got used to it now.
But there is one great plus.................The cats have dropped dramatically in my garden. I know which one i prefer in my garden!

Cats are something I would love to see the end of!

Looking at the size of the Sparrowhawk, I would have thought it may fall prey to the cat.

I'll like nothing more than to see the hawk have a pop at one of the annoying cats that think they own our garden (and our house sometimes, you just can't seem to frighten them off lol!)

When I was first feeding birds in the yard and a Sharp-shinned Hawk took up semi-residence for several weeks at a time throughout the year, I felt really guilty whenever it did take a bird (which, honestly, wasn't that often -- maybe once out of every 10 attempts that I witnessed did it actually get anything).

Then, one of the forest service biologists told me that the bird-eating birds of prey tend to hang out wherever there's a concentration of smaller birds; if the hawks weren't getting them in my yard, they'd be getting them at the birds' favorite watering place, or at the biggest clump of seed-bearing weeds and flowers in the forest proper. So, I don't feel guilty anymore and have actually felt glad that the hawks are getting something to eat. There are far fewer of them than their usual prey, which here is usually the House Finch, which are here by the dozens.

Hehe, well there's certainly a concentration of small birds in and around our garden so she'll probably be back soon!

Just don't take them when my wife's around!