There is a sparrowhawk in the garden nearly every day at the moment but he doesn't often come to sit on the perch. This is the current visitor, a very handsome mature male.
I have now realised that I have had three different birds in the last month. The first rather scruffy individual turned up at the end of August and was a yearling as he was just moulting his tail feathers for the first time. He was also here briefly as a juvenile a year before.
Another bird arrived in mid September and was clearly a different bird although he didn't stay long and hasn't returned so I never got a good close up view.
And the current visitor is different again. Here are the three latest birds in order of appearance, as they say. Compare the shape of the lower mandible, the shape of the cere (the waxy-looking yellow structure at the base of the bill), the shape of the eyelids, the shape of the nostril and the feather colours.
This means that there have been eight different sparrowhawks sitting on the perch in just under four years. And here they are:
No 1 was an adult male in early 2017, the first one to occupy the perch when I set it up.
No 2 was a juvenile male in the 2017/2018 winter.
No 3 another juvenile here in 2018/2019.
Nos 4&5 a juvenile and an adult who were both here throughout last winter.
Nos 6, 7 and 8 are the three from the last few weeks.
And here are the eight in portrait mode.
To begin with I wasn't taking close up views but I think they are probably all different birds. If the brown marks on the cere persist over time, as I think they do, the latest bird is new and wasn't here as a juvenile. He has a very distinctive ?-shaped or P-shaped mark which none of the previous birds had.
Here are a couple of comparisons between last winter's adult male (L) and the present visitor (R), taken in different light. The dark marks on the cere are different but I suppose they could have extended. The colouring in front of the eyes is also different. Otherwise these two are fairly similar.
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