Monday 6 July 2009

New visitor

As I pulled up home today a manky cat was walking slowly up my drive. I had a piece of bread left over from sandwiches so went to back to give to birds and noticed a big pile of feathers. Well I assumed it was the cat, but there was no sign of any torso, just lots of fluffy grey feathers and some longer straight tail ones. They were all close together and I was thinking it looked like someone had sat down and plucked a bird. It's hard to say from the pile what size bird it was. I'd say bigger than a small one, but smaller than a big one haha.


There were some big feathers with hints of yellow


And small feathers mainly grey


Anyway, I went back indoors thinking it will be quiet in the garden now when a few tits turned up in the tree. Then a swoosh of feathers and I thought a collared dove had landed (I seem to have lots recently) so I leaned forward to look at the ground when he turned round to face me. OMG was it really? Was it really a sparrowhawk? It certainly looked like what I would have thought one would look like.
I was excited to see a new bird in my garden, but upset to see what it actually was. He looked at me as if to say "yup, that's my handiwork" and flew off.

Any ideas as to what the poor bird was. I am looking at each bird that visits and can't narrow it down. It's a very grey colour. Darker than collard doves, but definitely not brown.

1 comment:

swatson said...

I have a sparrowhawk regularly visits joomoo and it took me a good while to be able to accept he needs food just the same.A lovely bird and hope you have your camera handy next time lol