At lunch time yesterday the sight of our sparrowhawk apparently dead on the balcony filled me with horror - for it was obvious that he had collided with the glass railing, something which several small birds have done over the last couple of years, often with fatal results, even though we have put decals onto many of the panes.
A close look suggested that the bird was dead. The only sign of life was his tail, which kept flicking up and down.
Then, very suddenly, and to my great relief, he was up on his feet, looking extremely confused but otherwise fine. My next worry was that he might have broken or dislocated a wing but, after almost half an hour of thinking about it, he finally decided....
....it was time to go - but he could not work out how to get either over or under the sheets of glass, expending....
....huge amounts of energy bashing himself against the panes until I could bear it no longer, so went out and shooed him in the right direction, after which he flew off at some speed.
We worried overnight that he still might not survive but this morning, standing at the kitchen sink and watching the tits at the peanut feeders, a familiar brown, barred shadow shot low across the road and into the gorse bush.
It could, of course, be a different sparrowhawk but it seems unlikely that a rival has moved so quickly onto our hawk's patch. So, hopefully, he has survived and learned a hard lesson.
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