WINGED TERROR

We were eating at a table in the kitchen when there was a horrifying thud on the outside of a window overlooking a patio. It was a bird. It had to be a bird. Young birds do occasionally try to fly through glass windows. This, I thought, must be terminal because there was some liquid running down the pane and there was an ugly smear where, presumably, its head had collided with the glass.

I didn’t rush out to see whether the bird was alive or dead. After a collision like this ‘alive’ would not have much significance because it would have been killed instantly or dead within seconds. I couldn’t see the bird because it had obviously fallen onto the ground and was out of my sight. Then, from my seated position, I saw something strange. Feathers were rising from the ground and coming into my sight. I realised that this could not be an ordinary window collision; how was it that the feathers were rising?

I walked around to another window and looked down to where I thought the hapless bird would have fallen. There in the corner there was a kestrel hawk standing on the corpse of a small bird. The hawk was pecking at the corpse rapidly; it appeared to be eating it.

I stepped back to get my camera and approached the raptor from another angle. Too late. The bird rose and flew over a hedge in seconds.

It had been no more than three minutes from the time of the window collision to the time of the bird’s departure and yet all that was left was a scattered pile of black feathers from what must have been a juvenile blackbird. But there were no feet left, no skull, no beak. There was nothing left at all but feathers and a small bloody smear on the patio.

I realised then that what I had witnessed had been a very efficient method of hunting and of food preparation. The young blackbird, terrified, had been driven towards the house and our window where it effectively killed itself. The hawk did not make the same mistake. It did not eat its prey; it simply plucked the little corpse and when I appeared it took off bearing supper for its young clutched in its talons, complete with head and feet.

At this point the garden was filled with screeches of protest and warning from the young bird’s family and from pretty much every bird that makes its home in our garden. Today the garden has been quite silent. A sort of mourning I suppose.