Oh dear not in the best of health (1 Viewer)

[oceancol]

spotted in my back garden near to the pond perhaps with suicide in mind??

I'm guessing a cat?

Any other ideas?

 

[Keith Dickinson]

I would favour it being sparrowhawk, all that plucking at the neck is definitely not cat. You got one lucky dove there.

 

[Stephen Dunstan]

You got one lucky dove there.

Can they survive any length of time with injuries like those?

Stephen

 

[Keith Dickinson]

Doesn't look to be loosing lots of blood so it's only body feathers and not flight feathers that are lost. So I reckon it'll go into body moult early and be as good as new pretty soon.

 

[Ronald Zee]

I wonder how it freed itself, that is if it was the victim of a Sparrowhawk.

 

[Andrew Rowlands]

I wonder how it freed itself, that is if it was the victim of a Sparrowhawk.

Magpies is my guess, they're very effective pirates when they work as a team.

 

[fugl]

Another possibility is that it was a young Sparrowhawk. In my experience, young accipiters are a lot less proficient in prey management than their elders. I’ve seen young Cooper’s Hawks, for example, lose control of large prey--California Quail, Mourning Dove--on a couple of occasions.