ANOTHER LIFE:A FINGER OF EARLY SUN grazed the window of the living room, with the shadow of a tree dark beyond it. This glancing light picked out a strange etching on the outside of the glass – a scatter of silvery marks that suddenly came together in a single, dramatic outline. Those slashing apostrophes some 50cm apart were the splayed feathers of wing-tips; shining lines curved down past the knuckles of the wings, moulded in a mosaic of tiny, oval feathers. And there was the roundness of an eye, then a sharp line from the beak, and below a swell of breast, a blurred splay of the tail, writes MICHAEL VINEY
I opened a window and peered down, half-expecting to find a feathery mound in the grass. But even without a corpse, the window’s silvery silhouette, stamped by the impact of oily, waterproofed plumage, was that of a sparrowhawk.
Then, by coincidence, came a letter from Rathgar in Dublin, and with it a splendid portrait of a female sparrowhawk (right) sitting on the rail of a bedroom balcony and looking distinctly dazed – so shocked, indeed, that she had let herself be photographed from two feet away, through the window into which she had crashed. Only the camera’s flash roused her to flight.
What made the occurrence even more special was its leafy setting on the banks of the River Dodder, where the late, great editor of this newspaper, Douglas Gageby, began his lifelong passion of planting trees. A row of pines now tower over Riversdale House and offer branches to nesting sparrowhawks, one of which had now woken a Gageby grandson. Douglas would have been delighted (not least at the bird’s recovery).
Intent on their chase, sparrowhawks hit windows relatively often. In one 30-year study at the UK’s Institute of Terrestrial Ecology at Monks Wood in Cambridgeshire, two-thirds of dead sparrowhawks examined had died from collisions, mostly with glass – almost twice the rate of dead kestrels.
This hazard has overtaken a species shaped by hunting small birds through trees. Rounded wings fit the close weave of branches, a long tail steadies the most amazing twists and turns, the barred breast vanishes in dappled shadow. When Ireland was fully forested, these fierce little hawks must have been whizzing about everywhere.
Even a century ago, when much of the countryside outside the big estates was quite empty of cover, the sparrowhawk was common enough to be a nuisance to humans. “All places are alike to him,” wrote John Watters in Dublin in 1853, “at one time plundering the dove-cot; at another, skimming over the farm-yard, he purloins a chicken; again dashing furiously against the cages [of songbirds] in the public streets; and lastly, following his terrified quarry, when the latter seeks a refuge in the presence of man, fearless of all obstacles, it is pursued through the open window, clutched up and away.”
Chasing a blackbird or robin, a male sparrowhawk swerved into my polytunnel a few autumns ago, where I found it dashing back and forth, whacking the plastic with its bill and apparently quite unable to find the open door. Tumbling at last into a corner, it surrendered into my hands, a lovely young bird, so much smaller than the female, its cool, silky plumage in slaty-grey and chestnut. Carried outside and tossed into the air, he flew off, rather groggily.
"A successful sparrowhawk pair," judged Ian Newton in his book The Sparrowhawk(T & D Poyser, 1986), "could account for 55kg of meat a year. This is equivalent to about 2,200 house sparrows, or 600 blackbirds or 110 woodpigeons."
The size of prey can depend on which sex is hunting. The cock is the busy food-provider in the breeding season, but the hen is the mother and long-lived survivor, her genetic priority served by big body reserves for winter. While the male can sometimes struggle to subdue a mistle thrush, the female will regularly take a full-grown woodpigeon weighing half a kilo.
A nun once wrote to me in some distress, a terrified squeaking in the convent shrubbery having presaged the emergence of a sparrowhawk clutching a thrush. Now that farmers no longer shoot hawks, having no chickens of their own to protect, should such predators not be “culled”? she wondered.
Mortality in songbirds is always high and it is often the sparrowhawk that thins out their abundant progeny. The absence of persecution and the spread of conifers in Ireland (the sparrowhawks’ preferred nesting habitat) goes with a massive spread of new gardens, now maturing with trees and shrubbery as cover for songbirds’ nests. If we have more sparrowhawks, it is because they have more prey.
This will not stop some people suspecting, at this time of year, that songbirds have “vanished” for sinister reasons. In fact, many are lying low while their seasonal feather-moult makes them less flightworthy, and others are assembling into roaming flocks for winter. They’ll be back.