Country & Coast: Putting a name to threatening visitor to our garden

Even when our gardens are subjected to fly-pasts by those larger visitors, they seldom land on our lawns or accept our hospitality. I would not describe any of the latter as garden birds even if we saw them regularly around the house. Nonetheless, my own modest garden has been host to wood pigeons, collared doves, magpies, a green woodpecker, a great spotted woodpecker, carrion crows, jackdaws, pheasants, a sparrow hawk and herons. I've even experienced the sight of a nutcracker (not a nut-hatch) on a tree close to our garden wall, and a corncrake in a nearby field.

But our birds can always spring a new surprise. One day in March we invited a neighbour for afternoon tea and sat in the conservatory that provides a view across the garden to the dale beyond. It was from here that we witnessed the determination of a sparrow hawk to catch a dunnock as I outlined recently in this column.

However, as we began our little tea-party, a large bird of prey suddenly arrived and perched on the wall of one of our borders, literally less than 10 feet (three metres or so) from the house.

My initial supposition was that it was a very large sparrow hawk but it took only a few seconds to realise it was far too big and infinitely more threatening. I estimated it was larger than a buzzard, something around the size of a red kite.

But it was neither of those. Our neighbour, a country woman who knows her birds, was initially baffled and so was I. The astonishing thing, however, was that it remained in that position long enough for me to obtain a reference book from my study although it must have been aware of our proximity behind large windows.

Binoculars were unnecessary – the bird was very close. I returned to find it still on its original stone without trying to feed and so we set about its identification.

It didn't take long to discover it was a female goshawk which is best described as very similar to a large female sparrow hawk with brown upper parts and streaked brown and white under-parts.

Within sight of our home is a large coniferous plantation, only a short flight away for such a bird, and this could have been its home territory.

Since then, I have seen various birds of prey in the skies above our house, including red kites and buzzards, but I now suspect some are goshawks.

www.nicholasrhea.co.uk

CW 20/11/10