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death & destruction....


ditchman
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so i put the bird seed out.............then it all started to happen

 

first...................sparrows come out of the hedge onto the seed....then there is a flash of brown and some sort of hawk swoops in and crashes spreadeagled into the hedge...it looks around ...then pulls out a sparrow and flies off...........

second...............so there i am watching the doves come down for the seed 2 or 3 mins later....one dove swoops out of the Acer tree.....WWOOOW...it explodes in a mass of feathers half way there...this bird does a loop de loop drops down onto it and carries it off...........one of then bloody perigrines from the factory silo

thirdly..............so there i am after all this panimoanium.....and the birdies are feeding.....i see down the bottom of the garden a couple of chaffinches bonking away on the lawn...................NOT....i squint my eyes and see one is trying to kill the other one....so i interveen....walk up the garden...tttoooooo late...the chaffinch is 90% dead all its feathers had been plucked out of its head...and all the skin pecked and pulled out of its scalp...covered in blood and in shock....so i do the kind thing..

 

all this happened in the space of 15mins..............christ i need coucilling............

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27 minutes ago, marsh man said:

What have we done to deserve this weather ditchy , I wont be surprised to see the snow drops making another appearance before to long 

my lawn is on sand and gravels.....and when i walk across it ....its all squishy underneath .............the ground is totally saturated........

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hello, they say its getting warmer next week, the start of this year has been some what chaotic with snow, storms, cold, rain, hot, rain now cold i have not seen many migrating birds yet, but red kites have doubled in numbers, saw 9 magpies in one field by the river, few native song birds and no sign of the cuckoo, oh while drinking my morning cuppa looking out the window on to part of abingdon town a young munty came looking around now thats a first. must get over to my friends farm tomorrow or i might need those DVDs to Ken 

Edited by oldypigeonpopper
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4 minutes ago, 39TDS said:

Bit of a random guess but I'm thinking Sparrow Hawk for some reason.

dont know.....i know what a kestral looks like and it was bigger and meaner looking than one of those....so you may well be right ..

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Pretty certain the first hawk would be a hen sparrowhawk. I have seen them chase woodpigeons and follow the pigeon as it tried to escape into fir trees  resulting in a cloud of feathers.

I have a large evergreen climber over a walk through arch where we feed the birds. The house sparrows love it as they can dive out and grab food and back into safety in a flash. I saw a hen sparrowhawk on top of this bouncing up and down wings outstretched trying to flush them out .... she failed. They sat tight.   Awesome bird though, particularly the male. Followed one down the lane one day and it was skimming the grass verge at close to 40mph with relative ease and then did a back flip over the hedge.

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1 hour ago, 39TDS said:

Have you ever seen it attack your hens?

havnt got any hens..

25 minutes ago, Walker570 said:

Pretty certain the first hawk would be a hen sparrowhawk. I have seen them chase woodpigeons and follow the pigeon as it tried to escape into fir trees  resulting in a cloud of feathers.

I have a large evergreen climber over a walk through arch where we feed the birds. The house sparrows love it as they can dive out and grab food and back into safety in a flash. I saw a hen sparrowhawk on top of this bouncing up and down wings outstretched trying to flush them out .... she failed. They sat tight.   Awesome bird though, particularly the male. Followed one down the lane one day and it was skimming the grass verge at close to 40mph with relative ease and then did a back flip over the hedge.

the 2nd kill was defo the perigrine...it was dark in colour quick and lethal......and has done it in my garden a number of times ...as i can see where they roost from the scene of the crime....

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I am afraid that when you provide a feed for song birds , in turn you also provide a feed for the local raptors.  It certainly livens up my garden when a sparowhawk visits , but another way of looking at it in an average year a blue tit fledges 10 young , without sparrowhawks those 12 birds would produce 120 young assuming there were equal numbers of males and females the following spring numbers would increase to  660 , and without winter losses and  predation the original pair would produce around 3 million young in less than a decade. After year 6 old age would start to creep in. So Thank god for sparrowhawks or we would all be wading about knee deep in blue tits.

 

I know this would never happen in the real world , but it does show the role of predators in keeping numbers down.

 

Edited by anser2
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3 minutes ago, anser2 said:

I am afraid that when you provide a feed for song birds , in turn you also provide a feed for the local raptors.  It certainly livens up my garden when a sparowhawk visits , but another way of looking at it in an average year a blue tit fledges 10 young , without sparrowhawks those 12 birds would produce 120 young assuming there were equal numbers of males and females the following spring numbers would increase to  660 , and without winter losses and  predation the original pair would produce around 3 million young in less than a decade. After year 6 old age would start to creep in. So Thank god for sparrowhawks or we would all be wading about knee deep in blue tits.

I actually quite like the sound of being knee deep in tits.  

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