Crested hawks for Christmas

Every birdwatcher has a list of sightings they dream about (if that sighting is accompanied by a National Geographic front-cover-worthy picture all the better).  For the cognoscenti – sophisticated, proper twitchers – this list seems to feature rare, endangered or hard to spot critters, that may or may not be kind of boring to look at.  But for the crass newbie like myself, bling is important. Flashy, that’s how I like my bucket list birds.

For a long time, a decent look at the gloriously multi-coloured (but annoyingly canopy dwelling) spotted pardelote was top of the list.  A camping trip to the fabulous Wolgan Valley a couple of years back ticked that box.  Worth sweating my way up a hill to look down on the magic of the diamond-bird.

Obviously rainbow bee eaters were on also on the list, until my parents moved to Bingara in on the northern slopes of NSW, a town where grey nomads and bird nerds duke it out for dominance in the local economy.

Since then, my top two have both been raptors.  There’s the black shouldered kite with its glorious red eye and hauntingly regular presence along highways. I see it often on long road trips, hanging out near boggy pasture land, but getting a photograph seems to require a willingness to pull the hand brake on at high speed in the middle of a major road.  I’m not saying I won’t do that, but I’m still working myself up to it.  And then there’s the absurdly excellent Pacific Baza.

Stunning golden eye – tick.  Dramatic black-and-white belly stripes – tick.  Elegant flight, even acrobatic during the mating season – tick again.

And, absurdly, a crest – its nickname is the “crested hawk”.  Does it get any better than that?  I think not.

I was hugely excited when I spotted what I thought was a baza in our neck of the woods a few weeks ago – zipping past and disappearing into the leafy top of a liquidambar tree.  Birds seem to be attracted by a pheromone released by amateur photographers who are not carrying a camera.  Certainly that was the case on this occasion.  Lacking any visual evidence of the encounter, I figured it was a wish fulfilment sighting.  Probably one of the collared sparrowhawks, also stripy chested canopy dwellers.   They’ve been back on the scene at our place over the last month or two, hanging out in the top of the neighbour’s pine tree, bragging about their kills and having brief and frustratingly hard to photograph sexual encounters first thing in the morning.

But this week – a late Christmas present.  My outstanding neighbours Laura and Steve texted to say that the mysterious bird they had previously seen lurking in a melaleuca tree had made at a guest appearance by another neighbour’s pool, and been IDed.  It was a Pacific baza.

It’s a miracle that I didn’t get hit crossing the road as I raced over to their place.

The trip to casualty that could have ensued would have kept my from not just a single baza but a little family – a pair (I think) and a large and whiny fledged chick.  Naturally, they were lurking in the very top of the tree, and of course, my skill-set with my flash new camera meant that my career as a natural history photographer is not going to take any great leaps forward.

Adult Pacific baza avoiding eye contact with a juvenile

Blurry as it is, I interpret the body language of the parent here as indicating an unwillingness to provide further snacks.  We saw both adults make a few short flights, and at least once definitely offer the youngster some prey.  The juvenile whined without interruption, inching along the branch towards the adults, ducking its head and restively half-opening its wings.  This parent avoided eye contact and eventually flapped off to a separate spot in the tree.   A couple of weeks after they leave the nest, apparently,  juvenile bazas stop getting food provided by their parents, so I guess this was what was playing out here.  Baby Baza was certainly less than happy.

Juvenile baza (I think) in a huff

To say I was ecstatic to see the family of bazas within 100 metres of my front door would be to underestimate my degree of excitement. But then a troubling thought struck me… would the presence of the bazas harsh the buzz of the sparrowhawk pair that I’d seen canoodling on my side of the street?  The pair appeared soon after a fierce storm that tore some big branches in our backyard and might well have trashed a nest somewhere down the road.  Would the appearance of the bazas spoil the chance of a late-breaking bit of nest building?

Like Pacific bazas, sparrowhawks spend a lot of time in the treetops.  They’re ambush hunters, lurking in amongst the leaves ready to burst out and pluck small birds from the sky.

They’ll take sparrows (perhaps unsurprisingly), mynahs and miners, mudlarks and wattlebirds, even birds as big as crested pigeons or crimson rosellas. Here’s a pic I took recently of a sparrowhawk trying to choke down the remnants of a leg of a bird.  See the toes poking out of its beak?  I watched it pacing up and down on the branch, wiping its beak repeatedly and generally looking a bit agitated.  I note that the left over leg remained untouched and I can kind of understand why.

Maybe its not surprising after this kind of experience that a sparrowhawk might want to ring the changes, diet wise.  And in fact, sparrowhawks won’t say no to a bug or two.  A Canberra study found half of sparrowhawks’ prey, by the numbers, were snails, spiders or insects, with Christmas beetles and cicadas a particular feature.  All those insects weren’t too filling – they made up only 2% of the biomass.  But still, that interest in insects could them into competition with bazas, which eat fruit, frogs, lizards and snakes, grabbed from the foliage at the tops of trees, but especially like stick insects.

Yet another thing to inspire delight in bazas – an eccentric specialist diet.  When I was looking at this critter in the Berowra train station, I wasn’t thinking “if only I ripped that to bits it would make a toothsome snack for my children”.  But if I was a baza, I would have been.

However, larger insects are a favourite of Pacific bazas, while sparrowhawks seem to go for nothing bigger than a huntsman or a cicada.

Disappointingly, the bazas have disappeared from the paperbark in Steve and Laura’s drive, for all its proximity to a refreshing backyard pool and ample opportunities for hunting in the tops of tall trees, undisturbed by competition for their favourite phasmids.  They’ll probably be nearby – these raptors aren’t migratory and Berowra sounds pretty close to their ideal habitat:

tropical and sub-tropical forests and woodlands, largely within 300km of the coast. In the breeding season they frequent tree-lined watercourses, rainforest, sclerophyll forest and tall woodland, but range widely following nesting to lower ground, when they may visit urban parks and gardens.

One birdwatcher in Queensland followed the reproductive fortunes of a pair of bazas as they nested in a series of different trees within a couple of hundred metres of his house on his property for a decade.   So, no National Geographic cover photo as yet but I remain hopeful.  2020 really was a dud year but with the crested hawk in town, who knows what fine things could be in store for us in our backyard next year.

Raptor encounters in our neighbourhood

Sex, nests and dogfighting – sparrowhawks set up house in our local pinetrees

Sparrowhawk sibling rivalry – baby serial killers learn to hunt

An eagle in suburbia – a wedgetail on Berowra Creek

The very big fish – sea eagle vs mulloway

 

References

  • Briggs, Allan (2018) “Breeding biology and behaviour of a pair of Pacific Bazas ‘Aviceda subcristata’ in central-coastal Queensland over 10 years”. Australian Field Ornithology, Vol. 35, 2018: doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.20938/afo35095101.
  • James, P. (2004). The breeding cycle of a pair of Pacific Bazas Aviceda subcristata in south-eastern Queensland. Australian Field Ornithology 21, 133–140
  • Olsen, Jerry, Judge, David, Trost, Susan and Stephen Debus (2018) “Diets of breeding Brown Goshawks Accipiter fasciatus and Collared Sparrowhawks A. cirrocephalus near Canberra, Australia and comparisons with other regions and raptors” Corella, 42

Motherhood on a windy day

Kid with mum distant 2 wide crop

Last year two collared sparrowhawk fledglings made it out of the nest high in our neighbour’s pine tree.  This year it was just one.  It’s been a lot quieter around here.  No squabbling over snacks.  No shuffling along branches side by side or pratfalls high in the canopy.  No hightailing it after a sibling chasing a feed.

There’s been more adult and parent bonding, though. I rarely saw the adults and offspring together last year.  But a few weeks ago, in windy weather, I got to see them hanging out low in the trees by our drive, sheltering from the tossing branches.

Juvenile against bark close crop

The juvenile looked, by turns, absurdly sleek and adult, and fluffy and completely gormless.  Mum (or dad) seemed to be wrestling with the same conceptual problem – how grown up is this chick really?

Typically when the sparrowhawks catch a juicy white-faced honey eater or wattlebird chick, they call out, over and over again.  I’m not sure if this the dinner bell for partner or offspring, or just triumphant territory claiming.  They swiftly pluck the small bird they’ve caught and then gorily and fairly rapidly consume it.

But on this particular day, the adult hawk sat very still, prey gripped tightly, not taking even a bite.  The youngster lurked awkwardly nearby, apparently not sure what to do next.

Kid with mum lower

Eventually mum (or dad), probably irked by the local amateur photographer, flew to a higher perch in the trees.  But her prey, plucked, pink and gleaming, was still untouched.

Mum with prey 2

She was waiting. Eventually Junior flew up to join her.

He still seemed clueless about what she wanted him to do – as indeed I was.  I’m willing to have a guess, though.

Adult sparrowhawks start by feeding their young little shreds of meat – the avian equivalent of pulled pork, I guess.  I have heard the adults teach the fledglings to catch little birds mid air by dropping little snippets of prepared flesh to them on the wing.  This youngster was definitely not in possession of that skillset.

Mum and kid with prey high 3

But I think dad (or mum) was trying to give the not-so-little little one a low-stakes chance to prep the dish for her (or him)self.  But it certainly wasn’t happening on this occasion.  Young blood had a good look, then stumbled past and took off, not even having a tiny go at flesh-tearing.

Juvenile from behind looking over shoulder crop

To be honest, I’m really pretty worried about this young one.  I’ve been working from home a lot lately, and every morning, I hear sparrowhawk calls, and I race up the drive with my camera.

But it’s just the adult I see, calling and calling and calling.

Further references

Barnes, C.P. and Debus, S. (2014) “Observations of the post-fledgling period of the collared sparrowhawk (Accipeter cirrocephalus)” from The Sunbird (2014) 44(1): 12–23

 

More sparrowhawk stories from our backyard

The end of the brush turkey plague? The battle of the baby birds….

There’s a collared sparrowhawk nesting in our garden…. or is it a goshawk…?

Our sparrowhawk summer

The teenagers start hunting for themselves… Sibling rivalry amongst the young serial killers….

Sex, nests and dogfighting

Sex, nests and dog fighting

Sparrowhawk from behind quite good crop

Adult collared sparrowhawk thinking about reproducing

The sparrowhawks are back!  And they’re ready to make babies.  How do I know?… well (ahem)… I’ve been watching. But not taking photos. No, that would be weird.

That said, I have captured the occasional intimate post-coital moment. It seems raptors don’t have a cigarette after coupling – they gnaw on raw flesh and collect sticks.  All in all, probably healthier options.

Pair Sparrowhawk pair square B&W

Post-coital moment.  Larger female (left) having a snack, male twig hunting.

Watching the pair collecting twigs to renovate the nest in the neighbour’s pine tree has been quite entertaining.  Collared sparrowhawks are such poised and elegant birds.  But with their finely built frame and long delicate claws they’re not natural construction workers.  Their technique seems to be to find some dead branches and leap awkwardly around on them hoping for the best, with a bit of light gnawing thrown in for good measure.

Sparrowhawk biting leaping on twigs crop

Sparrowhawk trying to create bits and pieces of stick for a nest

And whatever the sparrowhawks are trying to do, the pied currawongs are hanging around trying to stop them doing it.

It didn’t really surprise me to see a gang of six or seven currawongs loitering threateningly while a sparrowhawk tried to pluck and eat their breakfast.  I’ve seen the hawks move from tree to tree two or three times trying to get a few minutes without harassment.  But why would currawongs want to disrupt nest building? Especially when I’m pretty sure at least one or two of them got take-away chick from that very same nest last summer.

Nevertheless, the sparrowhawks have persisted, chasing off the currawongs whenever they can and fleeing them when necessary.  Aerial dogfights are a regular feature around here at the moment –  the hawks chasing away cockies and king parrots;  currawongs divebombing magpies and hawks; and of course me legging it after everything feathered with my camera. Not that the sparrowhawks seem to care about the activities of the humans down below.  All the critical action is happening in the canopy or the sky.

Sparrowhawk with twig stretched foot crop sharper crop

Collared sparrowhawk with twig heading back to do some nest renovation

More sparrowhawk stories

Death and sibling rivalry

Our sparrowhawk summer

Battle of the baby birds

Welcome back, beautiful stranger

A first glimpse of the sparrowhawks

Death & sibling rivalry

Both birds eyes crop better again

The sibling sparrowhawks in their favourite tree… in my backyard!

It’s happened. Our babies, only three weeks or so out of the nest, are now out there in the big wide world, killing for themselves.  It brings a tear to your eye.

Distant with second bird flying crop

Keeping an eye on little brother or sister

But it’s not all cheery dismemberment:  there’s trouble in the nest.  The siblings to have an uneasy relationship.  I often see them perched on adjacent branches, and when they’re further apart they call out to each other every now and then.  And when one takes off to hunt, the other often falls into line, disappearing suddenly in a simultaneous dive.

But there’s also a certain amount of what might be described in human siblings as petty jealousy.

Yesterday I stood on a chair on the deck for an hour watching one of the sibs engage in  a comprehensive preening session / extended tai chi practice.  I wonder whether this serious self-care might have been the consequence of getting tangled up in one of the humungous org spiders webs stretched out between the trees to catch dragonflies, cicadas and, for the really ambitious arachnid, a passing sparrowhawk.

Preening headless profile tail out crop b&w

… and the headless sparrowhawk

I found the “revenge of the headless raptor” impressive, but his nestmate, looking on from a high branch, seemed rather unimpressed.

Distant top brother looking down b&w

Jeering at silly sibling

But both martial arts and sneering were set aside when the fledgling in the upper branches spotted something tasty beyond the neighbour’s yard.

Juvenile sparrowhawk wings raised square

I’m off…

There was a simultaneous stoop, and then a fracas in the jungle at the bottom of the garden.

White cheeked honeyeater crop

Dinner… a white cheeked honeyeater I prepared earlier

I don’t think the squawking was the work of dinner – an unfortunate white-cheeked honeyeater (rarely seen in our yard.  I wonder why…).  I reckon the ring-ding battle was between the sibs.

The winner landed, very conveniently for me, right next to my washing line, showing the total indifference to human proximity that seems to characterize most young raptors.

 

Sparrowhawk profile left with untouched prey

The lucky sibling with significantly less lucky white cheeked honeyeater

This diffidence did not extend to the presence of little brother or sister though.

Juvenile looking behind for rival

Keeping an eye out

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juvenile with head turned mouth open amended

 

Just a few moments after the winner landed with their prize, there was another skirmish.  Luck favours the prepared, and this youngster was in position, with wings spread out protectively around the prey like a sort of meat umbrella. Ew, what a nasty image.

The hungry one had another go, and to be honest, I’m not really sure who was successful, since neither juvenile has any distinctive marks (like a scar over one eye or a dragon tattoo or anything) I am completely unable to tell them apart.

Juvenile plucking the prey

Settling in for a good plucking

Anyway, someone had a lovely meal of raw songbird and someone sat nearby looking on and feeling sorry for themselves.

Sibling watching

Luckless sibling looking on at the feast

Nevermind, buddy.  I’m sure there’s be some tiny, tasty, rather slow birds on the menu for you sometime soon.

The backstory of the serial killers in our backyard…

The new generation of sparrowhawks emerges from the nest…

Baby brush turkeys versus nestling sparrowhawks… the battle of the backyard baby birds

The collared sparrowhawks return to our backyard… or are they brown goshawks?

A first glimpse of the sparrowhawks… and a beautiful white goshawk visits the washing line

Sparrowhawk summer

The sparrowhawks in the bottom of the neighbour’s yard have beaten the odds.  Despite the visits of the hungry currawongs and randy cuckoos, two strapping fledglings have emerged from the nest this week.

Two juvenile sparrowhawks trying out their wings

Our days are punctuated by the insistent call of the mother and father hawks telling the teenagers that it’s time to head back to the ridiculously tiny nest for dinner.  And the juvenile’s answering pitiful cries, disproportionate to their galumphing size.  They’re easily as big as their parents even at this early stage.

Photo of juvenile sparrowhawk with its mouth open

Fledgling sparrowhawk talking back to its parent

And early in the morning, the ding-dong battles between the sparrowhawks and the local mob of sulphur crested cockatoos, that wheel across the valley each day to find the tastiest trees and finest roosting places. The hawks have been watchful but apparently unconcerned by the range of large and small humans arguing, gardening, driving, swimming and playing beneath their nest and, as you can see, endlessly photographing their activities.

But the arrival of a crew of a dozen or so seed eaters in their territory was apparently intolerable.  A crested pigeon is the biggest prey sparrowhawks have been known to take, but we’ve seen for ourselves they’re not afraid to send cockies and cuckoos packing.  The cockatoos didn’t take off without a bit of argy bargy but in the end the diminutive predators won the day.

The flock retreated off to our place, and relieved their frustration with some light demolition work on the rotting pine tree in our backyard.  I assumed it was the parents that did the chasing off, but Stephen Debus, who spent a lot of time hanging out in the Bundaberg Botanical Gardens with a digital camera and a pair of young sparrowhawks, seems to think that the young ones like to chase away bigger birds that they couldn’t possibly eat, everything from egrets, darters and ducks to kestrels and even currawongs, their erstwhile enemies.

There’s been an exciting new development in the last couple of days: the littlies are trying their hand with disembowelling.  Young nestlings are fed gobbets of freshly plucked bird flesh, straight from mum or dad’s beak, but this youngster was doing his own kitchen prep.  It took him a while.  Given the eye-claw coordination on display here, it may be a few weeks before this one is hunting on its own.  It seems that taking dinner from the talons of parents mid-air (and maybe snacking on cicadas in between meals) is the next step towards independence.

From the vantage point of our neighbours’ pool, we’ve watched the fledglings practicing their short haul flights (and awkward landings), whine a lot and bicker over food.  In a truly rare sighting, judging from my experience with human children, I even saw one of them give in to his sibling’s relentless complaining and share a meal.

Or maybe what I saw was big sister muscling in on little brother?  Sparrowhawks have distinct sexual dimorphism, and apparently any idiot can tell the smaller males from the females.  Not this idiot!  I look forward to being enlightened by sharp eyed readers.

As you can tell from the recent posts in this blog, I have got just a little obsessed by our in-house raptors these last few months.  Maybe because our four serial killers have cleared the area of other distraction – the usual “house” birds.

No baby brush turkeys this year (hooray!) and the noisy miners have been mercifully silent. But the gorgeous satin bowerbirds have also been thin on the ground, the newly arrived whipbird disappeared suddenly without leaving a forwarding address, and I’ve heard very few of the chocks and clucks of the wattlebirds that make up the usual soundscape of our neighbourhood.

We have about six weeks, it seems, before the young sparrowhawks will disperse, looking for another neck of the woods with the requisite tall trees for nesting and plenty of small gormless birds to ambush from a secret spot in the canopy.

Will the adults stay after the brood has gone?   Will they leave and come back next year?  It seems no one really knows much about the movement of these secretive birds, despite their presence all over Australia, in every habitat but the driest of deserts.

And, if our lovely raptors do leave us, will our usual cast of feathered friends – the nectar drinkers, the seed and flower and lerp eaters – return?

Further references

Barnes, C.P. and Debus, S. (2014) “Observations of the post-fledgling period of the collared sparrowhawk (Accipeter cirrocephalus)” from The Sunbird (2014) 44(1): 12–23

Debus, Stephen (2012) Birds of Prey of Australia: a field guide, CSIRO Publishing

 

More sparrowhawk stories from our backyard

The end of the brush turkey plague? The battle of the baby birds….

There’s a collared sparrowhawk nesting in our garden…. or is it a goshawk…?

and the latest from our backyard: the teenagers start hunting for themselves… Sibling rivalry amongst the young serial killers….

 

 

 

Battle of the baby birds

There’s a festival of death going on in our neighbourhood at the moment.

Several times a day, amongst the robotic clicks of the bower birds and the squawks of the wattlebirds, there’s an insistent high pitched chittering call, often accompanied by the din of freaked out noisy miners.  I’m not 100% sure of its ethological or evolutionary significance, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a signal for me to drop everything and dart up our drive with my camera.  One of the resident pair of collared sparrowhawks – probably the male – has caught some small clueless bird and is perched in our neighbour’s radiata pine steadily eviscerating it.

He rips off the feathers and flings away less tasty bits (check out the beak mid-air above) all the while, often with his mouth full, calling out “Dinner’s up!” to his mate.

For the last few weeks she’s been spending much of her time in a the nest at the very top of another decrepit pine tree in the yard of next house along the way.  Sometimes he flies up to the nest with tasty chunks of flayed bird flesh in his claws, but I’ve also seen her fly in to the designated “disembowling” perch to join him a few times.  Occasionally, she seems to sneak away to do a little light hunting herself.  Risky, though, leaving the nest unattended.

There’s the pied currawong I saw hopping surreptitiously through the branches, warily inching towards the nest, until it was chased off by the indignant parents as it was virtually peeping over the side.  And the pair of cacophonous channel billed cuckoos I caught flapping around the neighbour’s garden a few weeks ago – apparently they sometimes parasitise collared sparrowhawk nests.

But I will be deeply unimpressed if the chicks that come out of that nest are bloody channel billed cuckoos, for all my secret admiration of those giant hornbill beaks and strapping crucifix silhouettes.

Because the sparrowhawks seem to have rid our garden of the plague of baby brush turkeys.

A whipbird seems to have taken up residence this spring.  Needless to say, I don’t have a photograph despite being nearly eye to eye with the noisy bugger once or twice.  So, tiptoeing round my backyard trying to catch a clear shot, I heard a scrabbling in the leaf litter.  “Ah, a baby brushturkey” I thought sagely.

And then it struck me… I haven’t seen a single baby turkey in our backyard this year.  Not one!  Last year, they were sleeping on top of the predator proof cage or standing outside in the daytime, gazing longingly at our flock of little baby chooks.  The year before one wandered into our pocketsized laundry and spent eight hours pacing the two foot long windowsill, failing to notice and thus escape through through the wide open door.  But this year… nada.

Collared sparrowhawks (unlike their lookalikes brown goshawks – so similar that it’s altogether possible they could be our resident raptors) catch most of their prey in flight, bursting out of their lurking places in the foliage to grab little birds on the wing.  But the baby brush turkeys that previously haunted our place do fly, right from the day they dig themselves out of their hatching place in their father’s mound of decomposing leaf litter, and start their life of unnaturally early independence.

So maybe the sparrowhawks have been catching them on those very first short flights from mound to chicken yard.

I don’t hate brush turkeys, but I do hate a having dozen brush turkeys hanging out in my backyard, sexually assaulting my chickens, nicking their food and, given half the chance, eating their eggs.  So the idea of generations of sparrowhawks breeding happily in the neighbour’s trees and keeping the local population to manageable levels is extremely appealing.

I’m starting to wonder if there’s a connection between the familiar sound of chainsaws and the plague populations of brush turkeys in Brisbane and the northern suburbs of Sydney over the last few years.  No dingoes, fewer foxes foxes thanks to baiting, and nowhere much for the local raptors to nest in suburbia these days, the tallest trees victims of fears about bushfires and death-dealing or at least car-damaging falling branches.

But today my endless blurry photos of the neighbourhood raptor nest brought good news: what seems to be a creamy ball of fluff snuggling up to its mum in the distant collection of sticks that is the sparrowhawk’s nest.  Bring on the next generation of brush turkey assassins!

Welcome back, beautiful stranger

Sparrowhawk square crop old

It shows a certain lack of character and imagination to be keen on raptors, but I can’t help it.  I love them anyway.  Even the whistling kites and white-bellied sea eagles I clock every single weekend out in my boat on the Hawkesbury give me enough of a thrill to  clog up my computer’s hard drive with a thousand pictures of them in every conceivable posture and mood.

So two years ago, when I caught this beauty in my backyard, I was beside myself with excitement.  It’s a collared sparrowhawk, one of three species of Acciper found in Australia, along with the very similar brown goshawk and the hauntingly beautiful grey goshawk.  So beautiful that on my one and only encounter with one (whilst pegging out the washing) my camera fainted and so in its barely conscious state was only capable of producing a groggy quasi-mystical image of the world’s only pure white raptor.

I know our beautiful visitor in 2015 was a sparrowhawk and not the very similar looking brown goshawk, having been schooled on the key differences.  Brown goshawks are slightly grumpier and more threatening looking, with a beetle brow and chunkier legs.  Both species, it is said, waggle their tail on landing, but the sparrowhawk does it a tiny bit more rapidly.  As my brother, a much more expert bird watcher than I am, points out, this has to be the most arcane and pointless advice for distinguishing two very similar looking birds.  “Sorry lads, the video of your tail waggling was slightly out of focus.  Can you just circle round and land side by side on that branch again?”

Collared sparrowhawks also have another feature – the absurdly long middle toe of the collared sparrowhawk, used to grip its prey while it systematically plucks them (starting at the vent) and then devours them.  It’s moments like these you’re grateful not to be a sparrow or a silvereye, isn’t it?

But is that enough to tell the difference between a goshawk and a sparrowhawk?  Both apparently have these long middle toes – the sparrowhawks’ toes are just longer and more delicate.

There are other differences too.  Goshawks have a rounded tail, and a smaller eye.  So is it welcome back stranger… or good to see you, lifer?

Both the collared sparrowhawk and the brown goshawk are widespread through their range in Australia and New Guinea – they can be found in arid areas as well as woodlands and suburbia.  They are one of the few raptors that will perch and hunt in gardens, as I saw today.  The fact that they’re partial to a snack on introduced birds like sparrows, starlings and newly hatched chickens (gulp!) may be one reason why they’re considered “of least concern” to people who worry about the current mass extinction event.

But still, they’re not exactly common. Numbers declined from the 1940s through to the 1980s thanks to DDT, although the effect of this insecticide – thinning the shells of eggs – seems to have been less dramatic for them than peregrines and some other raptors.  Loss of habitat for the small birds that sparrowhawks like to eat and competition from pied currawongs that will (somewhat implausibly to my mind) attack both adults and chicks are other threats.

It’s been a long couple of years since that last wonderful visit.

But over the last few days there’s been a new sound from the decrepit pine trees that stand (or should I say lean) between our place and our neighbours’.  At first I thought it was a whiny juvenile wattlebird begging for a feed – the call was a kind of feeble high pitched kik-kik-kik-kik.  And then I saw a creamy coloured bird with wide striped wings and a blunt head, superficially like the “green” satin bowerbirds that hang around here all year round scrounging off my chilli bushes and demolishing my bean plants.

But there’s something distinct and decisive about the way raptors fly.  I eventually got a good look as the bird chilled out in the trees, waiting to ambush passing little passerines, which they catch on the wing.  I’m really hoping they have a taste for noisy miners.

good sideways distant crop wide

These really are very low-key birds.  “Often lives unnoticed in mature-treed suburban parks and gardens” one ornithology site comments about sparrowhawks… “easily overlooked”.  Having spent quite a bit of today staring slightly hopelessly into the naked branches for an immobile, unconcerned and well camoflaged bird of prey I can confirm this.   “Trusting and approachable“, the Peregrine Trust’s turn of phrase for a collared sparrowhawk, seems like a slightly embarrassing description for a predator.

Sparrowhawk profile crop tighter still

A gorgeous profile on display.  One very chilled out bird.

The grumpy reputation of Brown Goshawk is apparently not just a consequence of their Resting Bitch Face.  They’re also apparently quite aggro around the nest.  True to form, sparrowhawks are said to be calmer.

Perhaps this parental behaviour will be the solution to my ID problem.  There’s a nest made of sticks high in the neighbour’s pine tree, a spot I saw the sparrowhawk returning to several times today.  If there’s anything better than grown up raptors in your backyard, it’s a clutch of baby raptors.

nest rop

Could this be a sparrowhawk nest?

Nude trees and naughty birds

Who lives in our backyard?  How would I know? I haven’t been paying attention.

I see a flash of black and white down by the chook run and what do I think?  “Magpie”.  Humans, huh?

Yesterday, ominous thumps and crashes below the lightning-riven radiata pine had me racing to see if it had finally succumbed to a pincer movement of termites and southerlies.  But no, the demolition job was courtesy of a pied currawong, ripping the tree apart like it was a lego construction.  Well, a lego construction with integral insects.  Since in the (distant) future Lego will apparently be “sustainable”, one day this might even be a thing.

Perhaps it’s for the best that Lego’s green-washing target date is a decent decade and a half away.  Depending on how significant bark is to the structural rigidity of defunct pine trees we might need to use those infestation-proof plastic bricks – we’ve got enough of them under furniture and half buried in the garden – to rebuild our crushed house.

That’s if the currawongs are here to stay – and they might be.  Back in the day, before the ’40s, currawongs came down from the mountains to visit Sydney over the winter, but now they hang out in the big smoke all year round.  They like it down here, snacking on cute little birds and munching up the tasty berries of our attractive invasive plants.   If I want to save the roof, that monster privet the size of a redwood may have to go.

And a sighting today of another naughty black bird has cast doubt on the long-settled verdict in the Case of the Phantom Egg-Eater.

There was a stramash this morning between a crowd of brush turkeys and an crow, the latter carrying something that from a distance might appear to resembled a chicken’s egg.  I have no pictures of the actual incident but only an image extracted from the raven’s dream, in which hens’ eggs are light as a feather and easily borne in the beak for leisurely later consumption in convenient locations.

Later investigations showed that a freshly laid chook egg had indeed be devoured, but, in addition, one of the fake plastic eggs, carefully placed in the nest with to confuse and baffle hungry brush turkeys, had also vanished.

I’m not sure what this tells you about corvid intelligence but to me it suggests that ravens are optimists.  Apparently young European ravens are extremely curious.  In experiments where juvenile birds were offered “novel inedible items”, it seems, “birds never missed any potentially edible item … even with “highly cryptic objects”.”  I think it would be fair to call last year’s Easter hunt left-overs “highly cryptic objects”.  Maybe this was a young ‘un because apparently adult ravens are “neophobic”.  I’m assuming this doesn’t mean harbouring a hatred for Keanu Reeves in the Matrix sequels (though this is not an unreasonable viewpoint), but rather preferring actual foodstuffs to eccentric plastic replicas.

Where does the arrival of this new mob of razor sharp egg-robbers leave our prospects of our home-grown protein?  I can almost certainly outwit a brush turkey, but the socially adept, tool-using raven with the problem solving skills of a seven year old might give me a run for my money.  Perhaps I should plant some more broad beans.

And there’s more backyard black-feathered bandits where they came from.  The red-eyed, jet-feathered male koels are gone for the season, but the bowerbirds are back – mostly the “greens” – olive, stripey young bloods and females – but every now and then there’s a flash of violet-black as a grown male, glossy and gorgeous, disappears, full bellied, into the shrubbery, after a exhausting afternoon of shredding my kiwifruit vines.

But, despite my doziness, there was no way I could mistake today’s most magical visitor for a common or garden magpie.  Nude trees held no allure for her.  She watched me, still and cautious, from a leafy branch low in the hibiscus, patiently waiting for maybe five long minutes while I snapped away incredulously.

I reckon she came after the noisy miners that have descended on us over the winter, yipping and snapping at the wattle birds.  Last I saw the sparrowhawk, she was gliding off through the jungle at the bottom of the neighbour’s garden, indignant miners in hot pursuit.  I’m hoping she got the best of them.  What a fitting end for those hateful lerp eaters – fastidiously “killed, plucked and eaten”, all the while clutched in a sparrowhawk’s long and elegant middle toe.

I hope she’ll be back.  I’ll be keeping watch.