Sharp claws in fluffy slippers

Staring bleary-eyed out of the window this morning, something caught my attention. There was a bird on the garden fence. A closer look revealed it was a sparrowhawk, a young male (brown like an adult female, but smaller).

There was something very odd about him. He appeared to be wearing slippers like one of my next-door neighbours used to wear in the '80s (you perhaps know the kind: black, fluffy and trimmed with feathers). Around each foot was a tangled mass of dark, downy feathers, and some bits of grass.

Of course, everyone knows that birds don't wear slippers, and the feathers revealed what the sparrowhawk had been up to this morning, what sparrowhawks are good at - catching and eating birds. The feathers had got stuck round his toes as he plucked and ate his victim in the dull light of an overcast dawn.

A sparrowhawk is a noble, graceful bird, but this one was dancing about on the fence in a very strange, ungainly fashion.

Sparrowhawks have long, yellow toes and sharp talons which are ideal for catching and holding onto prey. They have long, thin legs so they can reach into vegetation to grab hiding birds. Their broad wings allow for amazing agility in the air and they can fly through startlingly small spaces after their prey (there's a fantastic sequence in David Attenborough's Life of Birds illustrating this).

An unwanted side-effect of the toes and talons seems to be that it's hard to disentangle unwanted feathers from them. The bird's frustration was plain to see as he shuffled from foot to foot, trying to pull the down off with his beak, then wiping it on the fence. By the time he flew off into my neighbour's garden (not the one who wore the slippers, incidentally), some of the feathers had gone but it looked like it might take a while to sort out...

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