It was on a Saturday morning while I was vacuuming the living room that I saw him, the main character of this story – a sparrowhawk. He (we think it’s a young male) was sitting on the fence close to the house. I’d seen him several times before recently, but always in a flash.
This morning, he gave me all the time in the world to get my camera and take pictures. Many pictures. Before I show you some of them, here’s the ‘scene of the crime’:
Looking through our living room window you can see an evergreen shrub, behind the hyacinths. It plays an important part in this story. To the left of it there’s a rain meter, to the left of that a tepee filled with sunflower seeds, and further to the left (not on the photo) there’s a bird table.
That’s where it all happened.
And here are some of the other characters in the story – a large and noisy family of house sparrows:
The sparrows love the sunflower seeds in the tepee, the seeds and grains we put out on the bird table and the peanuts in another feeder. They have lived in our garden for years, but it is only now that the sparrowhawk seems to have discovered them.
A sparrowhawk isn’t called sparrowhawk for nothing. It doesn’t care for sunflower seeds or grains. And peanuts? Blech! Their favourite food is… sparrow!
As soon as the sparrowhawk flies over the garden, the sparrows and other garden birds are gone. They hide in the beech hedge or in the evergreen shrub in front of the living room window. The garden seems deserted.
For the sparrowhawk, it takes a while to sink in. Where are they? Normally there are lots of sparrows on this bird feeder:
He looks down. No, no sparrow in sight.
Then he seems to hear something in the evergreen shrub. Aha, there they are. He looks at it from the rain meter. No, he can’t get at them from there.
Then he tries a different approach. Sitting on the grass he looks up. Hmmmm…
He walks around the shrub and looks and looks. But there’s no way he can get at the sparrows.
Finally he perches on top of the shrub, waiting patiently for the sparrows to come out of their hiding place.
Beautiful bird, isn’t he?
The sparrows wisely stay where they are. But suddenly, whoosh, the sparrow hawk grabs another hapless little bird from the honeysuckle against the fence. It went so fast that I could hardly see it, let alone photograph it.
Wow, what an amazing bird.
Apart from the birds, there isn’t much to see in the garden at this time of the year. The only other thing that catches the eye is the witch hazel we planted last autumn.
I’m very grateful for its cheerful yellow flowers.
Everything else is brown and grey, with a little bit of green here and there. If I want more colour, I have to look for it elsewhere. Fortunately there’s always yarn! (More about what I did with it soon.)
I can only show you static photos of the sparrowhawk here, but there’s an amazing 3-minute BBC video of a sparrowhawk if you’d like to see it in flight.
Hello,
Just wanted to tell you that I enjoy your posts very much, great Pictures, too!
Thank you very much.
Can’t wait to see what you made out of the colourful wool.
Best wishes!
Thank you and welcome! I hope to write about the wool soon.
Lucky you! He was certainly cooperative. By the time I get my camera out, the birds are gone. They seem to sense I am too eager!
Well, it was a one-off here, too. I think it was because as a young and inexperienced bird he was still a little incautious around humans.
Wat een prachtige foto’s!
Spannend in je tuin!
Ja, hè? Ademloos staan kijken.
Lovely post!
I had no idea that sparrowhawk and witch hazel are directly translatable between Swedish and English. Sparvhök och trollhassel. Well, almost. Witch is häxa in Swedish.
Ah, that’s interesting! The link between sparrow/sparv and this hawk is clear. But I wonder why witch/troll for the hazel?