"David Hill" wrote in
:

"...........We have a lot of buzzards in our area. Perhaps that's
why there has been a decline in songbirds here in recent years...."

We have anything from 4 to 10 buzzards here and I have often seen them
perching on a couple of our poles.
They certainly have done nothing to reduce the birdsong, on Tuesday
and Wednesday I was woken just before 6am by the Birds, don't think I
have known then quite so noisy.
We regularly have chaffinches, green finches, hedge sparrows house
sparrows, blue tits ,long tailed tits, great tits, and coal tits,
robins, blackbirds, thrushes, Collared doves, wood pigeons, a pair of
carrion crows, the odd starling(Though 10 yrs ago we had them by the
hundred), Green woodpecker, magpies, Jays, and the Buzzards, rooks, a
couple of Owls we hear at night or early morning. (NO wrens for the
last couple of years).All of these seen or heard in the last week.

Me too (except we have wrens as well, and a sparrowhawk, but I'm not
sure about 2 types of sparrow - haven't looked that closely! Oh, and on
one memorable occasion a hen at the top of an apple tree...)

I'd be surprised to see a buzzard take more than the occasional song-
bird - they are big things, and not all that manoeverable. I had a dog
that managed to catch one once (both dog and buzzard deeply embarrassed
by the whole thing, but both lived to tell the tale.)

I thought buzzards lived mostly on rabbits?

Our sparrowhawks don't seem to be making much of a dent in the local
bird population and nor do the magpies. The species clearly can co-
exist, or we'd have run out of small birds years back, so surely there
must be some other factor involved?

You probably get weirdos in most species - I've never seen a sparrowhawk
behave in the way Inge describes, but I'm sure it can happen.

As an example, I saw a spider try to eat a small frog once (yes, in the
UK, in my back garden!), but I'm not sure that's one of the bigger risks
faced by young frogs generally.

(I like frogs much better than spiders, so I ran the hose on it and it
left the frog and ran away. Maybe I curtailed the evolution of a
disturbing race of frog-eating spiders....)

Victoria
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gardening on a north-facing hill
in South-East Cornwall
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