Unexpected Visitors

Activity at the Achanha Hedgehog First Aid Centre seems suddenly to have switched to raptors. As Tony Thain informed The Diary on Sunday:

Yesterday, Tonia was cleaning out the hedgehogs in our "Wash-up" building when she was surprised to have a feral pigeon fly in through the open door. She was even more surprised when it was followed very closely by "Boadicea", a hunting Goshawk, who proceeded to catch the pigeon and have a punch-up with it in the pens that she had just cleaned and tidied. The pigeon escaped, to be followed by a very fed up Goshawk, leaving a bemused Tonia to clean up the pens again and remove all the pigeon feathers scattered over the floor.

Then, this morning, Tony emailed to say:

Following The Diary's insistence that photos were needed to go with reports, I talked to all the wildlife in our garden and told them that they could only do spectacular things when I had my camera handy! Obviously the request was passed around as Boadicea the Goshawk sent Attila the Sparrowhawk to put things right.

We were quietly sat in our lounge, having a lunchtime sandwich and cup of tea, watching the news, when much to our surprise a Sparrowhawk flew in through the open back door and perched on the windowsill. Tonia caught it, and I went for the camera.

As the hawk had hit the lounge window quite hard Tonia gave it a quick medical to make sure that there was no damage. I chose not to use flash with the camera as I did not want to stress the hawk out any further or to damage its eyesight, hence the quality of the photo is not quite up to standard.

Check-up over, the bird was released out into the garden to terrorise the small bird population.

Some people may think that the bird that Tonia saw hunting the pigeon was a Sparrowhawk and not a Goshawk, but Tonia is adamant that what she saw in the wash-up was quite larger than the one that she was holding and that it had different coloured eyes. It is well known that the two birds are very difficult to tell apart, but we have seen two hawks in the garden, one very much larger than the other. The larger was giving the feral pigeons a hard time, whilst the smaller was specialising in the small birds such as sparrows.