Feathers tell grisly tale of predator and prey

I SPOTTED it from quite some distance away and walked over to have a look.

There was a patch of pale coloured feathers over a metre in diameter on the grass beside the hedge. Like a forensic scientist at a crime scene, I used the clues to piece together what had happened.

They were all small feathers and had originally belonged to a wood pigeon. There were a lot of them, some grey ones from the back of the bird but most of them were white or white with a faint tinge of pink. These were breast feathers.

Close by there was a tall, ivy-covered hawthorn in the hedge. The pigeon had been sitting here digesting the contents of its crop. A sparrowhawk had flown at full speed along the hedge, travelling from left to right.

The startled pigeon had woken from its doze and taken off with a clattering of wings. The speeding hawk had hit it in the back with both talons. The impact probably killed the pigeon instantly.

Wood pigeons are rather loosely feathered and the small grey feathers were dislodged from its back by the hawk’s strike. The sparrowhawk was a female. Males are half the size and would never attack a bird as large as a wood pigeon. But even the big female hawk had a problem. Normally she would fly off with her prey in her talons to eat it in a safe spot. They have their favourite spots and they are often tall tree stumps called “plucking posts”. But the wood pigeon was too heavy, in fact it weighed more than she did.

So she began to pluck it on the grass where it lay. She turned it over and started plucking the breast, where most of the meat was. That’s where all the white and pink feathers came from.

She was nervous while she did this. Dozens of small birds had gathered round screeching alarm calls and this could attract unwelcome attention. So she looked round nervously all the time and did what falconers call “mantling” — this means she half-opened her wings and used them to shield her meal from view. There was no pigeon corpse, just feathers. Either the sparrowhawk flew off with the remains when they were light enough to carry or something else like a fox or a grey crow finished off her meal.

Sparrowhawks have a tough life. Of every 100 eggs laid only 12 birds survive to reach breeding age. But sparrowhawks face another hazard. Their habit of hunting at high speed around obstacles means they quite often fly into things and kill or injure themselves. A survey carried out on 341 sparrowhawks in one small area in England over 16 years discovered that 48% of the birds that died did so as a result of collisions.

By a strange coincidence a few days after I discovered the feathers and while I was writing this article a female sparrowhawk, almost certainly the same one, crashed into our kitchen window, causing my wife to jump about a foot in the air.

I went out to investigate. It lay on the yard with its wings and tail outspread for several minutes. I didn’t touch it, they can be dangerous. Eventually it flapped off groggily, soaring in an uncharacteristic way as it tried to clear its head.

[e-mail]