A flicker of movement caught my eye as I sat at my desk. Perched on a fence-post – no, not a thrush, not quite right. I raised the bins to perform one of the routine miracles of the birding life and turned the not-quite thrush into a wholly perfect sparrowhawk.
A male, compact, barred belly, rusty below the chin, bars on the tail. And that face: fierce yellow eye, barbed butcher’s hook of a bill. Hard to look at a raptor and think about anything except perfection.
There was a sense of insolent self-certainty about him. I read into that perched form – facing directly into the big wind and holding tight with those lethal paws — all kinds of messages of swaggering confidence. He looked like a bird that had it made.
How can we humans understand the doubts and uncertainties that surround the life of a top predator? The truth of the matter is that the predator has the hardest way of life of all. This buffeting weather made it a doubly difficult day for a flying hunter.
Most of the little, edible birds were hunkered down, out of sight. Those that took to the air were ten times harder to catch in these testing conditions. Even on good days most attacks end in failure. Here was a day on which starvation beckoned to all sparrowhawks apart from the very lucky and the very skilled.
We love to look at a bird and see a symbol: and so a sparrowhawk is a thing of terrible ferocity: brilliant, implacable, remorseless, certain. But this wild killer before me was perhaps eaten up with hunger, fear, worry, doubt, insecurity.
In my sportswriting career I have heard tales of self-doubt from some of the greatest athletes that ever drew breath. Today I got the same message from this hawk of truth.
Beautifully said, hoping to see more than a fleeting glimpse of this wonderful predator one day.
Best of luck in your hunt!
We are lucky enough to have a sparrowhawk that occasionally cruises over the garden and on really lucky days we spy her sitting on the fence. It is always a joy to see her. However, she has never again made the mistake of following a robin into our summerhouse, only to find the robin sat on my husband’s knee eating mealworms. We are still not sure which of the three was more shocked… it was a wonderfully close encounter.
What a splendid vignette. Thanks for telling me about it.
Not a predator, but a carrion eater: we have just returned from Cuba, where the sky was, on occasions, littered with Turkey Vultures, most of them outside the towns and in the mountains, naturally. They clearly are not hunted, as they are recognised as “cleaners-up”: we even saw 4 of them drifting over central Havana, close to the memorial to Jose Marti and the central park, insolent as all get out in their drifting overhead. But we came surprisingly close to one perching on a light on a walk up beyond the Orchid Garden in Soroa. This was before we took part in a bird-watching walk in the same village, where we saw the Lizard Cuckoo (uses other birds’ nests, as in Europe, we were told), the national bird of Cuba (name forgotten – we were too busy taking photos and looking through the glasses to write anything down) and other delights. BTW, can anyone suggest a reasonably low-priced source for the book Birds of Cuba, so we can identify all the wonders we saw?
Apparently, no raptors (according to our guide) in Cuba, so the small birds fly about with impunity!
Sparrow hawks almost certainly slaughtered the blue tit parents that had nested below the eves of our house that resulted in my taking down a nest of perfect, almost fledged dead blue tit nestlings looking like a child’s toy. It broke my heart because I put the nest box there. It made me complicit in their deaths. I cannot like sparrow hawks.
How do you think the moth mother’s feel about blue tits eating their beautiful caterpillars? Nothing in the wild world is simple! But I do understand how you feel.
Watched a raptor (I’m a bad watcher..so couldn’t identify it) hovering, diving, crisis-crossing several acres of hillside above Dancing Ledge, near Swanage for best part of an hour without any success! Maybe still learning the art of survival??
Being a predator is a seriously tough job – the hardest job of all.