Have you ever seen a Sparrowhawk take a Wood Pigeon from your garden?

Hi

male Sprawks take Collared doves around my feeders :

S

Hi.

No i have not seen it take a wood pigeon but I did witness one take a goldfinch from my feeder this week.

Magnificent birds but not what I want to happen.

Here he is looking Magnificent (sorry such rubbish picture)

Kath x

I've not seen one take a wood pigeon from a feeder or in flight, but I have seen the evidence of wood pigeons being taken, both close to and away from the feeders.

Yep had at least 2 wood pigeons that I saw taken from feeders and that was in a fairly built up neighbourhood. i think sparrowhawks travel a fair old distance if they have to but rarely linger long so seeing them is a matter of minutes at most. Let's hope it was the hawk taking them!

They are so fast Cunir so unless you stand watching all day..blink and you could miss it! I had a male sprawk in garden yesterday drinking from the fountain..then sat on the feeder pole for a second then flew off...he often flies in and out the garden trying to catch a meal but more often than not he's unsuccessful!

So this happened on Saturday...

We have been having a sparrowhawk come in our street about once a week at the moment. I have put a photo on this thread of him, rubbish photo but best I could at the time.

I came home on Saturday and looked across the road and sat on my neighbours pergola was the sparrowhawk bold as anything waiting for a sparrow to come out of the hedge in my her garden.

They have nested in her hedge for years and they have feeders hanging down from the pergola so they literally just sit in hedge and pop out for food and back in hedge again. They do pop over to me as well for some food but mostly stay in my neighbours garden living the best life.

The noise from the hedge was horrendous and they were literally screaming as they knew what was waiting for them outside.. I walked over to her garden to try and detur the sparrowhawk waving my arms and making noises, as much as the sparrowhawk is a magnificent bird and needs to eat I just didn't want to see it or hear it.

The sparrowhawk came nearer me and just sat on the fence between me and the hedge and just stared at me. He was not bothered by me at all and was looking at me as if to say I'm not moving so don't bother trying to move me!!!

I was literally a few feet away from him it was crazy how close he let me get to him....

Of course you know what was coming, I walked back to my house defeated that I couldn't stop him and he sat waiting and then got bored so dived head first into the hedge!!! Sparrows flew out in all directions and he flew after one up the road, he was then hopping around the floor with the sparrow not sure if he did manage to kill it or if it got away.

Haven't seen any sparrows in my neighbours garden since it is very quiet...

Mmm...doesn't sound like typical sprawk behaviour in my opinion ...only thing I can think of is..Was it injured or an escapee from a private owner that's been hand reared and used to humans but am sure someone far more experienced than me may have a better explanation on why it didn't fly away as soon as you approached it.

I wonder, perhaps Kath's Sprawk may have been human-raised or may have been injured or a bit under the weather for some reason and had been unable to hunt for a while, making it very hungry--too hungry to be worried about Kath standing staring at it (well, at him/her/non-binary/whatever...their choice!). I have heard stories more than once about encounters with a Sprawk when one whizzed past a person standing in their garden, so close as to ruffle their hair, the Sprawk seemingly intensely concentrating and fixed on its potential dinner and not at all bothered by the person who chanced to be in its way. They also do regularly dive into hedges or so I have read but I have yet to see that behaviour.

As for the Gos at your friend's, Dave, it seems unlikely a wild Gos would carry prey to the inside of a building to pluck it but would only go inside a building to catch prey which it had worked out was in there.

As for my friend's Gos in Anchorage, I imagine that if she had not intervened, that the remaining flock of Mallards eventually would have dispersed or gone as a flock elsewhere for their dinners and the Gos would have moved on as well. And just speculating you understand, I, too, might have caved in after half a dozen Mallards had met their maker--there's no telling, but I am not completely without heart! In fact, I am far soppier now than I was many decades ago. As a child, some of my best friends were domesticated Mallards, one in particular named Llewellyn by my Mum (but sorry, we are not Welsh--its a long story...) That one was preceded by Fluggy (name due to a typing error in my Mum's letter to her family; she was originally (more accurately, un-originally) named Fluffy by we children but as she grew to a lumbering maturity, Fluggy suited her far better). And we had Chickens, too--all of them taught me a lot about birds.