Two Hunters

Walking through Speckled Wood on Monday morning the excited twittering of small birds drew my attention to....

....a silver birch in which what I took to be a young tawny owl was perched. I was so close it must have been aware of me but for some minutes it ignored me, after which it gave me....

....a withering look before flying off low through the trees.

We found the warning chatter of small birds very useful during our years in Rhodesia because the noise often drew our attention to the presence of a snake, usually a boomslang as these snakes spent most of their lives in trees and bushes.

It's not often that one looks up from reading the newspaper to see a raptor just below the sitting room window tearing the feathers from a dead blackbird, but that's what happened yesterday afternoon. The raptor was a female sparrowhawk, perhaps the mate of the male who died so tragically a fortnight ago - see story here.

One or two birds, notably a male blackbird, made attempts to chase her away but she simply ignored them.

When she'd finished she flew off with the plucked corpse, hopefully to feed some young.

While the male sparrowhawk was a fairly frequent visitor to our garden this was the first time we'd seen the female.