The hawks’ return

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It was i July last year that I met this sparrowhawk on our city street. I guess it was a young bird, as the intruding magpie seemed to flummox him until I came on the scene. Hawk and prey into the brambles, magpie off to scavenge elsewhere. And I into town.

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In the year since then, disaster befell the hawk. About 30 metres from this picture, taken by the back gate of a plumber’s merchant’s warehouse, the hawk was found dead by the showroom door, its breast ripped apart by another predator.

We thought it most likely he had swooped down on another little bird and hit the plate glass window at speed, breaking his neck. A handful of neighbours at least mourned his passing.

Two days ago a partly dismembered collared dove lay on the pavement not far from the original encounter. As long as a certain neighbour continues to feed the birds so generously, I think we can say we have our sparrowhawk back!

Wood Pigeons in Winter – just a glance

Every year the wood pigeons nest in the tall birch in next door’s garden, while there are two old collared doves’ nests in our apricot tree.

Usually the pigeons stick together, perched in the same tree, even upon the same branch, but this month one of them has been resting in one of the lime (tillia) trees we planted after the hurricane, which are now big enough to take a collared doves’ nest at least.  The two birds were within sight of each other.

Which tree would the wood pigeons choose? Were they utterly estranged, or perhaps strangers to each other; I had no way of telling. But this morning both were in the birch tree. An early sign of Spring?

After a night shift

Mrs Turnstone came in from her night shift and went to  bed, but a few minutes later I heard the floorboards creak in the back bedroom. As ever of late, the wood pigeons and collared doves were filling the air, keeping her awake. I was reminded of Robert Frost’s Minor Bird:

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song. 

Sweet Dreams, Mrs T!

Parallel lives

Mrs T often comments that we are allowed to use the birds’ territory for our garden. Two examples of this today.

It was time to prune the apricot tree, but some of that must be postponed. As I cut through a shoot some 3 metres above the ground I saw that the fork leading to it was occupied by a brooding collared dove. I’d seen the nest before, but it was built while we were away for a few days, and I thought it had been abandoned as a silly place to build. It was a silly place to build, but it was not abandoned, so it will have to be respected. Unless she abandons it again.

The second example was the cock blackbird, leading one of his daughters around the garden, demonstrating the art of pecking food from the floor, or even aphids from the prunings of the apricot tree, while we sat at our evening meal. At least it is peaceful co-existence; neither doves nor blackbirds are aggressive thieves, unlike the Canada geese in the Royal Parks!

Baby blackbird from a previous summer.

Dawn Chorus

Before the traffic roar started this morning, I was out of bed and making a drink. The gulls, pigeons and collared doves were busy calling, blackbird and robin asserting their territory, but right outside the kitchen window, a scrap of brown feathers expanded to three times its rightful size and proclaimed its love for Jenny.

If she’s Jenny Wren, is he Johnny? She followed him, away across the back gardens.

And so the day started.

Good Morning Life

And all things glad and beautiful.

WH Davies.

Listen to the wren here: BBC nature_Wren