Sparrowhawk update

It has been more than two weeks since the sparrowhawk featured on this blog so here is an update.  I have seen him every day since then and he even showed up when my friends Lucy, Alice & Naomi came for lunch.  If anything, he seems to have calmed down a bit and his preferred strategy now is usually to sit underneath the gooseberry bushes and look for small birds flying in to the kitchen garden feeder.  You can see from this photo that he had already eaten one.

He does still use the perch overlooking the bushes and will make the occasional foray to the feeders on the other side of the house but usually he saves his energy.

Here he is eating lunch on Christmas Day, blue tit not turkey.

This was Boxing Day, on top of the feeder.

The next day he was sat on the fence in the sunshine.

He has been making regular kills in the garden so I reckon he is doing OK.  If he hangs around too much (one day he was outside the window for six hours) the birds get wise to him and avoid the kitchen garden feeder completely.  When he catches a bird he plucks and eats it straight away to reduce the chance of it being stolen.  He eats everything except the wings and tail feathers and some of the body feathers.

Even while eating he is watching for the chance of catching another one.

Here he is just starting to pluck his dinner.  It is quite a grainy video as it was late afternoon in deep shade.  There isn't much meat on a blue tit so you can see why he needs to catch at least three a day.  Don't watch if you are of a sensitive disposition.

He always eats his prey in the same way, starting with the head and ending up with the legs.  This video clip shows him swallowing a whole blue tit leg.  It goes down thigh first so the claws don't catch in his throat but it still takes some getting down.

I watched a programme about peregrine falcons yesterday.  Although similar in design to sparrowhawks, and doing a similar job, the differences were amazing.  The peregrine has huge eyes, a huge beak and powerful talons and makes the sparrowhawk look almost cuddly (but not if you are a blue tit).  It is a bit like comparing a Ferrari with a Mini.  I was also intrigued to read recently that falcons are more closely related to robins and parrots than they are to hawks. Another example of convergent evolution.