Buzzards prefer to dine on rabbit, not lamb

RECENTLY in this column I wrote about the anomaly of having legal shooting seasons for bird species that are of conservation concern.

It provoked quite a reaction, with some readers agreeing with me and others disagreeing. Red grouse were the birds that provoked the most reaction Grouse shooting as a sport is deeply embedded in our outdoor heritage. Gun-dog breeds like the Irish red setter were bred specifically to hunt them. And some readers claim that grouse are nothing like as endangered as I stated. The difficulty here is that there’s a lack of hard scientific data about a bird which, because of its preferred habitat, is rather difficult to count. In order to try and gather a bit of unscientific data I’d like to ask any readers who have come across grouse recently to get in touch and tell me whether it’s their impression that the species is declining or increasing in the area concerned. If I get useful information I’ll return to the topic on this page at some stage in the future.

Meanwhile, my son came home for the weekend and asked if there were any eagles in the area. I told him that eagles were extremely unlikely in Co Kildare. But he said he was sure he’d seen one when he was driving up from the local village. It was at the edge of the road eating a rabbit. I soon established that it was a buzzard not an eagle — it’s an easy mistake to make if you’re not used to seeing large birds of prey — and explained that they were spreading rapidly around Ireland and had first bred in our area about 10 years ago.

This provoked a bit of a family discussion. My son had got a very close look at the buzzard beside the road and was impressed by the size of the bird. He said that if it could kill a rabbit surely it could kill a new born lamb, as there wasn’t much difference in the size of the two animals. Surely the local farmers wouldn’t welcome the arrival of such fearsome birds.

I told him that buzzards did kill rabbits but they didn’t kill lambs. They occasionally ate carrion, so they might feed on the carcase of a lamb that had died of natural causes or been killed by another predator, but they didn’t kill live lambs. In fact it was quite likely that the one he saw beside the road was helping itself to a road fatality rather than eating something it had killed.

Afterwards I thought about what he’d said. It was quite logical because there isn’t much difference in weight between a new born lamb and an adult rabbit and buzzards certainly do kill rabbits. In fact, rabbits are their first choice of prey and buzzard numbers in Britain crashed for about 20 years after the introduction of myxomatosis. So I decided to do a bit of googling to make sure I was right.

It was an interesting exercise. There is no record from anywhere in the world range of the common buzzard of one of the birds killing a lamb. I’ve no idea why a hungry buzzard passes on what seems like an easy prey item, but apparently that’s what they always do.

It’s also obvious that not everybody believes this fact. I came across a lively discussion on an Irish email forum with a farmer asking how to get rid of buzzards from his land and various people assuring him that the birds were actually a benefit rather than a threat because they ate rabbits, rats, mice and the odd magpie or grey crow. There were also a couple of stories about buzzards being illegally poisoned. Old prejudices die hard.

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