The kill

The sparrowhawk has been in and around the garden a lot in recent days and I have seen him make several kills - all blue tits.  He usually plucks and eats his prize where he is but not always in view of my camera.  I think he kills his prey by squeezing it to death with his sharp talons, usually taking only a few seconds with a small bird.  During this time he looks around anxiously for robbers and if there is a magpie or a crow about he flies off to eat in peace somewhere else.

He takes the kill to somewhere he can keep hold of it and get a firm footing.  He eats nearly all of it, apart from most of the feathers, starting with the head and finishing with the legs (he swallows a whole leg complete with claws etc).

I don't know how often he makes a kill.  Sometimes he dashes off and doesn't reappear for 15 or 20 minutes so I can't tell whether he has killed and eaten out of my view - I suspect he has.

I read (in The Sparrowhawk by Ian Newton) that a male sparrowhawk needs to eat around 40-50g of meat a day, which equates to about three blue tits (or two great tits) per day.  That is 1000 blue tits per year which is a pretty astonishing number.  Given that a pair of blue tits will produce about eight young per year it means that a single sparrowhawk eats the equivalent of half of all the broods of 250 blue tit nests.  Obviously it eats other species as well but you get the idea. It really is an apex predator.