SparrowhawkCam

I haven't seen much of the sparrowhawks recently but they continue to visit the garden nearly every day.  I check the perch when I walk past the window but to get a better idea of what they are up to I have been using a trail camera to keep an eye on them.

The more frequent visitor is the adult bird.  The top photo is a composite of three processed and cropped images. Below is an unprocessed screen grab from the video.  I think the quality is OK although the highlights are a bit blown.

The videos show that he usually stays only for a minute or two.  I am not sure whether he flies off after looking around and deciding it isn't worth staying or because he launches an attack and catches something.  It may also be because the weather has been so windy recently that he has difficulty keeping his balance, as you can see on this video.  (As a measure of how slow my BT broadband is, uploading this one clip to YouTube took over an hour!)  

The adult bird doesn't usually pay much attention to the birds hiding in the gooseberry bushes but he did this time and dived down in attack.  He didn't return to the perch so perhaps he caught something - if he did so all the remaining feathers had blown away before I got home.

All the pictures above were recorded with a Browning camera (with the Poundland close-focus adapter!).  At one point both Brownings were deployed elsewhere, looking for otters, so I used the Wingscapes BirdCam Pro for a while.  It has an adjustable pre-set focus but it isn't accurately calibrated.  It also seems to have a fairly low (non-adjustable) shutter speed for still photos so for both reasons the first time I set it up the bird was blurred, but at least the photo was good enough to confirm a visit from the juvenile bird. 

This camera uses white light LEDs for video rather than infrared so it records colour video but it tends to switch on the light as soon as the natural light level is a bit low.  Unfortunately it then produces overexposed pictures with exaggerated vibrance and saturation which are impossible to correct in post-processing.  As I found last winter, the sparrowhawks take absolutely no notice of the lights coming on.  So far I can't find any way of adjusting the strength of the lights, or any way of switching them off.  Here is a recording of the adult bird, a bit too close and again on a windy day.  You can see the lower image quality but he doesn't mind the lights.

And here is the juvenile the next day, very over-exposed with blown out highlights.

A couple of days ago the adult bird was here and the Browning camera shows he was jumping onto the top of the hedge to get a view from there.  Again the highlights are blown out so I can't correct the overexposure on the frame grabs or on the video.  I think this is just a result of having a darker background and automatic exposure control with no override but it is less of a problem with the Browning than with the Wingscapes camera.

This video is a composite of three consecutive recordings a few minutes apart.  The camera doesn't see him arrive because it doesn't start until triggered and there is then a 0.5s reaction time.  You can hear the panic in the alarm calls of the small birds in the gooseberry bushes.

Yesterday it was the turn of the juvenile.  You can see he takes more interest in the besieged birds in the gooseberries, although his brief attack was unsuccessful.  He also likes the view from the top of the hedge.

It looks as though both birds will grace the garden with their presence throughout the winter. I am looking forward to it more than all the small birds in the garden.