Bringing dishonour

Birds of prey can and do thrive on keepered land but the criminal few drag us all down with them

- MIKE SWAN

Sparrowhawks. Every time I see one I cuss. Whether it is a big female in relation to my precious grey partridges, or a musket (male) with designs on the house martins under my eaves — and the blue tits and other small birds at my garden feeder — they are a threat to things I love. But the cuss is not without its measure of admiration; sparrowhawks are supreme stealth and ambush predators.

Picture this: a good friend was parked on his farm drive, along a narrow and dead straight lane with neatly trimmed hedges alongside. He was beside a gap, looking out across the fields to his left. When he looked back he spotted a musket powering towards him down the middle of the lane, a foot or so above the tarmac. Just before it reached him the bird set its wings to glide and, without hesitation, slipped under the car.

A glance in the nearside wing mirror revealed it coming back up, then banking hard to its right down a strip of bushes, where experience had clearly taught it there was a fair chance of catching some small bird by surprise.

Whatever the media may think, raptors are mostly doing very well in the UK. When I was a child growing up in west Surrey, I needed to go at least as far west as the New Forest for the chance to see a buzzard. But, in the half a century since then, they have recolonised the lost ground and are now found in pretty much every parish of the UK.

They had, of course, been pushed to the western and northern fringes by human activity, but let’s avoid using the word persecution; it has connotations of deliberate cruelty which do not apply. Our ancestors, and not only keepers, killed them for a multitude of reasons, of which protection of game was only one.