Over the last couple of months I’ve upped my bird nerd quotient a notch. Having already distressed my teenagers by revealing that the jolly bird calls they were hearing each morning were the sounds of our resident raptors in flagrante, I have taken my prurient interest in the intimate lives of avians one step further. At last I have some good pictures of sparrowhawk sex. If you don’t want to see them, look away now.
In my defense, our resident pair were at it relentlessly for three months. When I say relentlessly, I mean at least four or five times a day. Not so much morning noon and night, more early morning, morning, morning, morning and occasionally late afternoon. It was hard to ignore, although I found my colleagues less intrigued than I expected when I drew their attention to the ambient sounds of bird sex in the middle of zoom meetings.
Because I’m a worrier, even before living through a pandemic, hearing avian coupling for month after month ended up making me feel quite anxious about the reproductive systems of our pair. Why so much sex? One of my Gen X pals suggested drily that perhaps they were very young. Had they failed to produce eggs and were keeping at it until something happened? Or were they just enjoying themselves?? Are sparrowhawks the bonobos of the raptor scene? Strangely, the published literature has failed to help me with this question.
This unrestrained mating duet somehow suggests an element of enjoyment but I’m no doubt anthropomorphising.
A typical “bout” as D.H.Lawrence might have put it, would usually start with the female sitting high in my neighbour’s pine tree calling for her mate. Often she was in possession of some prey, and demonstrated a bit of multitasking by intermittently ripping out its entrails between summons.
Eventually the male would turn up, perch on a nearby branch and then hop over to engage in some avian sexual congress. My attention during this period was directly primarily towards the snacks. Would the female share a hunk of flesh as a bit of a “thank you” to her partner for, as it were, coming on command?
It appeared not. I watched the whole sequence of activities a few times, and while the male would lurk nearby for a while, possibly eyeing up the gobbets of LBB flesh in the claws of its mate, I never once saw the female share the spoils.
On this occasion the female sparrowhawk flew off with a large chunk of uneaten prey (mostly, as you can see, legs). At the time, I was hoping she might be heading toward the nest to feed some hungry chicks.
With no post-coital snacks on offer, the male often ended these encounters by gathering material to renovate the nest. Trying to work out what was going on, I struggled to imagine him somehow inserting these liquidambar leaves around some eggs or wriggly, begging chicks. I began to suspect this pair did not quite know what they were doing.
Despite neighbourhood excitement every time one of the pair flew towards the nest with some prey, it seems that this year there won’t be any sparrowhawk fledglings doing yoga in the trees or playing by the swimming pool. Throughout this cool and rainy La Nina spring, there was mating and there was nest building, but nothing came of it. Perhaps the nest blew away in one of this year’s storms. Perhaps the late appearance of the cicadas meant fewer easy snacks. Perhaps the pair just simply didn’t produce any fertile eggs. All I can say is, they certainly tried.
Come back next year, my lovelies. I might even give you more privacy this time.
More raptor tales from our Berowra backyard
Cartwheels and company: the young eagles