Sorry to hijack someone else’s thread and sorry to ask this without a photo. About a month ago in east Leicestershire whilst following a colleague up a tarmac farm track towards the A47 a bird appears to my left approx 2-2.5m above the ground ( it was higher than my mates Rav 4 roof bars, I’m not sure whether it had passed over me from my rear right, or followed the fence/track. There is a 3 bar wooden fence to my left, approximately 1.5/6m high. Ie climb on the bottom rung to step over the top, but not really high. As I’m watching, the bird banks onto its side showing a pale underside and then drops in a vertically (to my eyes) down to the floor (or so it appeared). We both pull up and my mate says what was that?! We walk to the area between our cars and there is no bird there. It hadn’t flown across the field and it hadn’t I don’t think flown along the front of the straggly hedge in the fence line. I think it had gone under the fence and flown along the hedge line back down the hill as I heard a blackbird alarm call behind me somewhere.
My mate said his glimpse was a gray colour.
So, is this a Merlin possibility? I have seen a peregrine nearly take my head off as I walked past the corner of a field near Blaston as it hunted along the hedge line and flew immediately in front of me. But my thought with this was my impression was brown not grey, mate says greybut he would have been looking at a different angle and different part of the bird, whereas my view was underside.
My main view was this was an extremely agile bird. My main instances of sprawks hunting, is them coming in low and fast into areas they know where small birds are generally.
Although I did manage to watch a beautiful sprawk defeathering a still flapping presumably woodpigeon on a road the other day…
